Research Project : Brand Awareness & Consumer Satisfaction in Respect to measure The Customer Loyalty of STUT International Students to Acer Brand ppt

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of customer satisfaction or brand awareness to customer loyalty of STUT international students in respect to Acer’s laptop. This study also examines whether the satisfaction and brand awareness of STUT international students in respect to Acer’s laptop intentions. The simple regression result showed that customer satisfaction or brand awareness significantly has a positive effect to customer loyalty. Moreover, there is a high brand awareness and customer satisfaction of Acer’s laptop of STUT international student.

Keywords: customer satisfaction, brand awareness, customer loyalty, simple linear regression

I. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background


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Laptop is a computer that integrates all of the elements it needs to operate, including a battery power supply, display, and keyboard in a relatively small box. Laptop has grown to be one of the potential hardware products in IT field. The output growth of laptop is higher than desktop PC in the world. Presently, laptop is able to challenge desktop PC instead of only a complementary to it along with the stronger functions and lower prices. The price of laptop is generally higher for slightly less performance and hardware configuration of the laptop is much less flexible, except for the connection of additional external devices through multiple ports. However, the main interest of a laptop over a desktop computer is its mobility and reduced footprint.

Many undergraduate and graduate students have to use laptop both in and out of the classroom especially for international students. In Taiwan, especially at Southern Taiwan University, there are many international students who are using laptop to support their study. And how do they choose their laptop? International students are label-consciousness of consumers, who prefer internationally recognized brands rather than domestically designed products.

There’s a whole lot of talk about Taiwanese-made laptops these days. Taiwan-made laptops have joined the pack of leading brand names such as Compaq, IBM, Apple, and Toshiba. Competitively priced and qualities have given consumers a wider selection. One of Taiwanese manufacturer laptop is Acer, which is a high-tech product of laptops that are known around the world.

This study investigated the influence of awareness and consumer satisfaction to consumer loyalty in respect of Acer Brand and how does the awareness and satisfaction level of STUT International students on Acer’s Brand. This study was conducted to find out the awareness of laptop and STUT International student behavior in respect of Acer brand. However, lack of interest and enthusiastic responses may have allowed biases in this report.

1.2 Motivation

On recent years, laptop has been regarded as a necessity, there is no doubt that demands for laptop increase from year to year. But, increasing demand is also accompanied by an increase in the number of competitors, on one side it will be beneficial to consumers because there are more selections available.

There are so many selections of laptop’s brand offered in Taiwan, especially in Tainan City where STUT’s International students lived. Similarly, there is much information available to assist the STUT’s International student in deciding which laptop they want to buy.

And, we want to explore what influences STUT International students’ choice of a particular laptop brand. How their level of awareness and satisfaction will affecting their loyalty into some particular brand, especially Acer brand as the subject of our research.

1.3 Purpose

Based on this, we are interested to investigate the effect of awareness and consumer satisfaction of international student at Southern Taiwan University, which makes the customers become loyal to Acer’s Brand. Furthermore, we want to know their awareness and satisfaction level of Acer’s Brand.

Thus, our research questions are as follows:

Does Acer brand awareness have a positive effect on STUT International students' loyalty?
Does customer satisfaction have a positive effect on STUT International students’ loyalty?
How do they aware about Acer brand as a laptop?
How does the Acer laptop satisfy STUT International students who are already using it?

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Customer Satisfaction

Satisfaction can be broadly characterized as a postpurchase evaluation of product quality given prepurchase expectations. Based on Anderson and Sullivan review (1993) customer satisfaction and the main antecedents identified by consumer research: expectations, perceived quality, and disconfirmation.

Satisfaction was found to increase with both perceived quality and disconfirmation. This is an important finding given the strong focus of satisfaction research on expectations and disconfirmation as the antecedents of satisfaction. In addition, sat¬isfaction was found to have a positive impact on repurchase intentions. Moreover, both positive and negative disconfirmation were found to increase with the ease of evaluating quality. Hence, it may be more important to manage customer satisfaction when cus¬tomers are very familiar with a product or the product is not complex.

Firms which consistently provide high-quality products should have a more satisfied customer base and one that is more likely to be retained. An important component of managing satisfaction is the ability to control the impact of negative disconfirmation through com¬plaint handling and effective customer service. Since negative disconfirmation hurts the firm more than positive disconfirmation helps it, firms should take measures to maintain reliability when improving quality. It would be helpful to understand the conditions under which firms should allocate resources to maintaining quality before improving quality. The firm's future profitability depends on satisfying customers in the present. If consistently providing high satisfaction leads to higher repurchase intentions, then the expected number of times a buyer will repurchase should rise accordingly.

Customer Satisfaction is being an achievement of a company as it is an important task to satisfy the customers, considering that company’s sales come from two basic groups which are new customers and retained customers. Customer satisfaction can be identified as a result of the post purchase stage in a chain of buying process. While in post purchase evaluation, consumers take further action after purchase based on their satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The satisfaction of the customer refers to the relationship between the customer’s expectations and the product’s perceived performance (Kotler and Armstrong, 1999).

Satisfaction or dissatisfaction commonly emerges after the cognitive dissonance that mostly resulted in the term of evaluating what has been bought by the customers, while the customers make sure that they have done a worth buying decision otherwise they would have a buyer’s remorse condition.

“However, there is another type of unprofitable customer. This is the customer who is unprofitable in the current period and also in the future, perhaps because customers are becoming more demanding, have higher expectations, more knowledge, more buying power, and are more sophisticated in their buying behavior.” (McDonald et al., 1994)

Theoretically, satisfaction ratings should be linked to repurchase behavior. Yet this link may be difficult to observe in a commercial satisfaction survey if satisfaction ratings vary because of differences in customer characteristics. Consumers with different characteristics have different thresholds and consequently different repurchase probabilities. So, at the same level of rated satisfaction, repurchase rates are systematically different among different customer groups. Empirical research linking satisfaction to repurchase behavior has been lacking, especially for durable goods.

Customer satisfaction is a key issue for every company wishing to increase customer loyalty and thereby create a better business performance. The customer satisfaction has a positive effect on customer loyalty. This may be a coincidence but it could also indicate that a given loyalty could be obtained in many different ways. One way is to increase customer satisfaction by branding and similar activities, another is to be price effcient.

2.2 Brand Awareness

Many things for the ACER-Laptop make affect their sales, one of that is how the brand is also the factors that affect. Brand is the intangible sum of an organization’s attributes, which can include an organization’s name, history, reputation, and advertisement. A brand is also an identifying symbol, sign, or name that distinguishes an organization or a product from its competitors. Good branding can results in loyal customers.

Brand awareness is treated as a dichotomy that addresses both recognition and recalls objectives, and brand attitude is discussed in terms of the interaction between the underlying motivations driving behavior in category and the involvement associated with purchase decision. brand awareness associated with brand management is how a company structures and runs its business. A critical step for brand management is to develop a customer model that includes insight into how customers think and act, make purchase decisions, use products and services, and see their brands fitting into their lives.

Brand awareness is a crucial consideration. It may be thought of as a buyer’s ability to identify a brand within a category in sufficient detail to make a purchase. It is important to remember that sufficient detail does not always require identification of the brand name. Often it is no more than a visual image of the package that simulates a response to the brand. When a brand is recognized at point of purchase, brand awareness does not require brand recall. This is a key point in the consideration of brand awareness as a communication objective.

Brand awareness is a measurement of consumer knowledge of brand existence. It can be defined as the likelihood that consumers recognize the existence and availability of a company's product or service. That has been proved by previous studies that brand awareness is very important way of promotion, especially for commodity-related products which there are very few factors that differentiate one product from its competitors. Thus, the product that has a high brand awareness compared to its competitors usually gets higher sales. In addition, consumers have awareness of a product will make a buying decision faster than non-awareness condition.

Rossiter and Percy (1987) describe brand awareness as being essential for the communications process to occur as it precedes all other steps in the process. Without brand awareness occurring, no other communication effects can occur. For a consumer to buy a brand they must first be made aware of it. MacDonald and Sharp (2000) examined a set of brands with marked awareness differentials and found an overwhelming preference for the high awareness brand, despite quality and price differentials.

McDonald and Sharp (1996) identified three roles of brand awareness in purchasing decision. First brand awareness as a consideration set, second brand awareness as a heuristic, and the third brand awareness enhanced perceived quality.

The difficulty relates to the essential difference between recognition and recall, a different that is extremely important to advertising strategy. Brand recognition and brand recall are two separate type of brand awareness. The different depends upon the communication effect that occurs first in the buyer mind: category need or brand awareness.

The brand is quite literally presented to the consumer first, and this is what stimulates the consumer to consider the relevancy of category need. Very few shoppers actually carry lists and those who do will only have category reminder, not brand names, on their list. Shoppers rely upon visual reminder of their needs as they scan the packages on the shelf and brands are recognized. Brand awareness is not a simple issue. It has at least two major components, and in fact one can even look at recognition brand awareness as being either visual recognition or verbal recognition. Brand awareness is a function of whether or not recognition of the brand drives category need (recognition awareness) or whether category need drives brand awareness (recall awareness). This distinction is critical to effective advertising strategy.

2.3 Customer Loyalty

According to Bowen and Chen (2001), having satisfied customers is not enough, there has to be extremely satisfied customers. This is because customer satisfaction must lead to customer loyalty. Customer loyalty involves building a long-term relationship between the supplier and the individual customer in order to improve profitability. Bansal and Gubta (2001): “Building customer loyalty is not a choice any longer with business; it’s the only way of building sustainable competitive advantage. Building loyalty with key customers has become a core marketing objective shared by key players in all industries catering to business customers. The strategic imperatives for building a loyal customer base are as:

• Focus on key customers
• Proactively generate high level of customer satisfaction with every interaction
• Anticipate customer needs and respond to them before the competition does
• Build closer ties with customers
• Create a value perception”.

Sivadass and Baker-Prewitt (2000) said “there is an increasing recognition that the ultimate objective of customer satisfaction measurement should be customer loyalty”. Loyal customers would purchase from the firm over an extended time (Evans and Lindsay, 1997). Thus the key to generating loyalty is to get customers to recommend a store to others. Also, customers are likely to recommend a department store when they are satisfied with that store and when they have a favorable relative attitude towards that store”. Evans and Berman (1997): “Companies with satisfied customers have a good opportunity to convert them into loyal customers – who purchases from those firms over an extended period”. Long-term customer retention in competitive markets requires the supplier to go beyond mere basic satisfaction and to look for ways of establishing ties of loyalty that will help ward off competitor attack”.

As far as organizations are concerned, they want their customers to be loyal to them and customer satisfaction does not guarantee this. According to Storbacka and
Lentinen (2001), customer satisfaction is not necessarily a guarantee of loyalty.

They said that in certain industries up to 75% of customers who switch providers say that they were ‘satisfied’ or even ‘very satisfied’ with the previous provider. Customers may change providers because of price, or because the competitor is offering new opportunities, or simply because they want some variation (Storbacka and Lentinen, 2001). Clarke (2001) said that customer satisfaction is really no more than the price of entry to a category. For satisfaction to be effective, it must be able to create loyalty amongst customers. Sivadass and Baker-Prewitt (2000): “There is increasing recognition that the ultimate objective of customer satisfaction measurement should be customer loyalty”. Loyalty is vulnerable because even if customers are satisfied with the service they will continue to defect if they believe they can get better value, convenience or quality elsewhere.

McIlroy and Barnett (2000), “in a business context loyalty has come to describe a customer’s commitment to do business with a particular organization, purchasing their goods and services repeatedly, and recommending the services and products to friends and associates”. Anderson and Jacobsen (2000) said customer loyalty is actually the result of an organization creating a benefit for a customer so that they will maintain or increase their purchases from the organization. They said that true customer loyalty is created when the customer becomes an advocate for the organization, without incentive. Clarke (2001): “The notion of customer loyalty may appear at first sight to be outmoded in the era of the Internet, when customers are able to explore and evaluate competing alternatives as well as checking reports from others – at the touch of a button. Bowen and Chen (2001): “It is commonly known that there is a positive relationship between customer loyalty and profitability. Today, marketers are seeking information on how to build customer loyalty. Finally, loyal customers cost less to serve, in part because they know the product and require less information. They even serve as part-time employees. Therefore loyal customers not only require less information themselves, they also serve as an information source for other customers”. McIlroy and Barnett (2000) said that loyalty cannot be taken for granted. They said that it will continue only as long as the customers feel they are receiving better value than they would obtain from another supplier. Anton (1996): “When you can increase customer loyalty, a beneficial ‘flywheel’ kicks in, powered by:

• Increased purchases of the existing product,
• Cross-purchase of your other products,
• Price premium due to appreciation of your added-value services,
• Reduced operating cost because of
• familiarity with your service system,

Positive word-of-mouth in terms of referring other customers to your company”.

n order to ensure that there is customer loyalty, organizations must be able to anticipate the needs of their customers (Kandampully and Duffy, 1999). According to Kandampully and Duffy (1999), a customer’s interest in maintaining a loyal relationship is depended on the firm’s ability to anticipate customer’s future needs and offering them before anyone else. According to the study done by Bowen and Chen (2001), it supported the contention that there is a positive correlation between loyal customers and profitability. Bowen and Chen (2001): “The result of our study supported the contention that there is a positive correlation between loyal customers and profitability. Loyal customers indeed provide more repeat business and were less likely to shop around for the best deals than non-loyal customers”.