The Influence of Brand Handbags LOGO on Perceived Quality

The Influence of Brand Handbags LOGO on Perceived Quality

Ying Xue

College of Textile and Clothing Engineering Soochow University

Suzhou, 215123, China

Dr. Xiaofeng Jiang

Cong Meng

College of Textile and Clothing Engineering Soochow University

Suzhou, 215123, China

(Correspondence Author)

College of Textile and Clothing Engineering Soochow University

Suzhou, 215123, China

AbstractExternal information about a product can have an impact on the perceived quality and purchase decisions of consumers. A behavioral experiment was conducted to investigate the presence of a brand LOGO and the impact of a brand LOGO positioning on consumer perception quality. The results show that the presence of a brand LOGO has a significant impact on consumers' perceived quality, and that consumers perceive products with brand LOGOs as being of higher quality; the presence of a brand logo does not have a significant impact on the response time of consumers' perceived quality, and does not contribute significantly to speeding up consumers' purchase decisions; different positioning of brand LOGOs have a significant impact on consumers' perceived quality, and luxury brand LOGOs have a positive impact on the perceived quality of products. The research results can provide references for different brand enterprises to use LOGOs.

KeywordsBrand handbags; LOGO; perceived quality

1. INTRODUCTION

   As a visual symbol, the apparel brand LOGO not only conveys the design concept of the brand product and the cultural connotation of the enterprise, but also gives the brand product visual beauty and added value through the combination with the apparel product.

   The apparel brand LOGO transmits brand information to consumers through certain graphics and colors, and is also a visual carrier of brand positioning, brand image, product quality and other brand-related information. For example, when seeing the double G logo, consumers will think of Gucci, associate it with leather goods and shoes, and think of high-end, luxury and sexiness. It can be seen that brand logo is the most important visual element of the brand and can effectively increase consumers' awareness of the brand.

   Consumer perception is a complex psychological process, which is the process of understanding and remembering products and brands, and this perception process will influence their purchase decision behaviour. It is an abstract and subjective evaluation of a product or service that consumers made by combining their own use of the product with the information they received from various sources in the marketplace. It has been found that visible aspects of the product become the basis for the perceived quality when the

   information consumers receive is incomplete[1].Through experimental research, Dodds William B found that brand names and store names have a positive impact on consumers quality perception, value perception and purchasing behavior[2]. Montgomery studied the price-quality relationship between well-known and non-known brand products in the context of lower average quality of well-known brand products and found that well-known brand names reduce customers' perception of risk[3].

   The quality cues obtained by consumers can be divided into intrinsic cues, which are part of the material properties of the product, and extrinsic cues, which are related to the product but are not part of the material properties of the product. For meat, colour and the amount of visible fat are intrinsic cues; for detergents, colour, soap and smell are intrinsic cues. Extrinsic cues include price, brand name, logo, origin and shop name[4]. In the process of purchasing and consuming, consumers will combine both internal clues and external clues to perceive the goods, form cognition, and finally make purchase decisions. The experiment, by Banovic et al. , found that consumers perceived higher quality of beef from well-known brands in their own country compared to beef from unknown shop brands in Brazil[5]. Huang Yijun found that clothing LOGOs with a higher degree of favorability can enable consumers to produce rapid or long- term purchase behaviour, and that brands with a higher degree of familiarity are conducive to developing brand loyalty, promoting consumer purchase habits and forming a virtuous circle[6].

   In this study, two variables, the prominence of logo in the appearance dimension and the positioning of the brand in the connotation dimension, are used as independent variables, and the perceived quality of consumers is used as the dependent variable. The experimental material and the subjects are screened by questionnaire, and a behavioral experiment is conducted to investigate the influence of the presence of a brand logo and the positioning of the brand logo on the perceived quality of consumers.

   1. Method

2. QUESTIONNAIRE

   Six brand logos were finally selected as materials for the subsequent experiment, three luxury brand LOGOs for Dior, Chanel and Gucci, and three popular brand LOGOs for

   1. Participants

      One hundred textile and fashion engineering students are randomly selected. Participants with normal or corrected vision voluntarily participated in the experiment.

   2. Materials

      We chose twenty women's bag brand LOGOs, including ten luxury brand LOGOs and ten popular brand LOGOs, and used Photoshop software to manipulate them so that all brand logos are presented in black and white, in the same proportions.

      Fig. 1. Figure 1 Ten luxury brand LOGOs

      ZARA, H&M and TUCANO.

      Fig. 3. Evaluation of luxury brand LOGOs in familiarity and popularity

      Fig. 4. Evaluation of popular brand LOGOs in familiarity and popularity

      1. Method

         1. Participants

3. EXPERIMENT

   Fig. 2. Figure 2 Ten popular brand LOGOs

   1. Procedure

      In this experiment, we surveyed the familiarity and popularity of the LOGOs of 20 women's bag brands in the form of a questionnaire survey. Using a five-point Likert scale, participants rated the brands according to their familiarity and popularity: the evaluation level of familiarity was divided into 1-unfamiliar, 2-not very familiar, 3- average, 4-relatively familiar, 5-familiar; the evaluation level of popularity was divided into 1-unknown, 2- not very well-known, 3-average, 4-relatively well-known, 5-well-known.

      1. Results

         Figure 3 and figure 4 show the familiarity and popularity evaluation of the participants with the LOGOs of luxury women's bags and popular women's bags respectively. In general, the participants showed high familiarity and awareness of the luxury women's bag brand LOGOs, while the familiarity and awareness of the different popular women's bag brand LOGOs showed a large difference.

         Specifically, among the luxury brand LOGOs, Dior had the highest familiarity and popularity, followed by Chanel, with Gucci in third place. Among the popular brand LOGOs, ZARA and H&M had significantly higher familiarity and popularity than other brands. Compared to other popular brands, C&K and TUCANO had slightly higher familiarity and popularity, with C&K having higher popularity than TUCANO and lower familiarity than TUCANO.

         To facilitate the experiment, the brand LOGOs were selected by familiarity as priority and popularity as reference.

         Forty students who were familiar with the experimental brand LOGOs in the questionnaire were invited to participate in the experiment. Excuding data from the eleventh participant, a total of 39 participants (37 females, 2 males; age range of 21 to 23 years) were textile and fashion engineering students. All participants with normal or corrected visual acuity, who had not participated in similar experiments, volunteered to participate in this experiment.

         1. Materials

            We collected ten pictures of simple women's bags and used Photoshop software to combine six selected women's bag brand LOGOs with ten women's bags, resulting in seventy pictures measuring 140mm x 140mm with a light grey background: 10 pictures of women's bags without LOGO, 60 pictures of women's bags with LOGO (10 pictures of each LOGO). All styles of women's bags had the same body height, and for the same women's bag, different LOGOs were placed in the same position and the LOGOs occupied approximately the same area.

         2. Procedure

            The experiment was conducted in a quiet, brightly lit room and was programmed using E-Prime 2.0 software. During the experiment, the stimulus was presented in the center of the display with a grey background and participants were seated in a chair approximately Sixty centimeters from the display.

            The formal experiment was divided into two phases, the first phase randomly presented pictures of women's bags without logos, and the second phase randomly presented pictures of women's bags with logos, a total of seventy stimulus pictures, each picture was presented once. At the beginning of the experiment, the attention point "+" was first

            presented for 100ms and the grey screen for 400ms, then the stimulus pictures were presented randomly, and after the participants evaluated the perceived quality of the stimulus pictures, the stimulus pictures disappeared, and then the interval was randomly 500-700ms to enter the next trial. Participants were required to quickly and accurately evaluate the perceived quality of the stimulus pictures on a scale of 1 to

            5, with 1-very poor, 2-poor, 3-average, and 4-good,

            5-very good. In order to familiarize participants with the experimental operation, the practice experiment was performed before the formal experiment, and the whole experiment lasted about 5 minutes.

            +

            100ms

            400ms

            20000ms

            To further compare the influence of brand logos, in different brand positioning, on the perceived quality evaluation of women's bags, independent-sample t tests were conducted on the perceived quality evaluation with and without logos under luxury and popular brands respectively (as shown in Figure 7 and Table 3). The results showed that there was a significant effect of LOGOs on the perceived quality evaluation of women's bags under luxury brand positioning (p=0.000), and the participants evaluated higher perceived quality of women's bags with luxury brand LOGOs; under popular brand positioning, there was no significant effect of LOGOs on the perceived quality evaluation of women's bags (p=0.510), and the perceived quality evaluation of women's bags with LOGO brand was slightly lower than that of women's bags without LOGO brand, without reaching

            statistically difference. The participants perceived quality

            evaluation of women's bags with luxury brand LOGOs is much higher than that of women's bags with popular brand LOGOs.

            500-700ms

            Fig. 5. Experimental flow

            +

            100ms

            1. Results

               1. The influence of brand LOGO on the perceived quality of women's bags

                  We analyzed the participants perceived quality evaluation of branded women's bags as influenced by the presence of the LOGO by independent-sample t test (as shown in Table ).

                  The results showed that there was a significant difference in the participants perceived quality of branded womens bags as influenced by the presence or absence of a logo (p=0.046), with participants rating the perceived quality of women's bags with LOGOs higher than womens bags without LOGOs. It can be seen that the brand LOGO can improve the perceived quality of women's bags.

                  TABLE I. INDEPENDENT-SAMPLE T TEST ON PERCEIVED QUALITY OF WOMEN'S BAGS REGARDING BRAND LOGOS

                  Fig. 6. The perceived quality of women's bags regarding brand logos in different brand positioning situations

                  brand positioning	the presence of LOGO		mean difference	t	P
                  	without LOGO	with LOGO
                  luxury brand	2.985	3.569	-0.584	-4.049	0.000**
                  popular brand	2.985	2.896	0.089	0.662	0.510

                  TABLE III. INDEPENDENT-SAMPLE T TEST ON PERCEIVED QUALITY OF WOMEN'S BAGS REGARDING BRAND LOGOS IN DIFFERENT BRAND POSITIONING SITUATIONS

                  the presence of LOGO		mean difference	t	P
                  without LOGO	with LOGO
                  2.985	3.233	-0.248	-2.027	0.046*

                  1. * indicate statistically significant differences at p < 0.05.

                     Similarly, an independent-sample t test was conducted on the effect of LOGOs on the reaction time of participants perceived quality evaluation (as shown in Table ). The

                     results showed that the presence of the brand LOGO had no significant effect on the reaction time of participants perceived quality evaluation (p=0.357).

                     TABLE II. INDEPENDENT-SAMPLE T TEST ON PERCEIVED QUALITY REACTION TIME OF WOMEN'S BAGS REGARDING BRAND LOGOS

                     the presence of LOGO (ms)		mean difference	t	P
                     without LOGO	with LOGO
                     1140.713	1101.968	38.745	0.928	0.357

                  2. * indicate statistically significant differences at p < 0.05.

               2. The influence of brand LOGOs on the perceived quality of women's bags in different brand positioning situations

      c. ** indicate statistically significant differences at p < 0.01.

4. CONCLUSION

Through behavioral experiments, this study explored the influence of brand LOGO and different brand positioning on the consumers perceived quality of women's bags, drawing the following conclusions:

• The presence of a brand logo has a significant impact on consumers perceived quality, with consumers perceiving products with brand logos as being of higher quality.

• The presence of the brand LOGO has no significant impact o on the reaction time of consumers' perceived

quality evaluation. The use of LOGO cannot promote consumers quality perception, cannot make consumers perceived quality judgment easier and faster, and had no significant contribution to accelerating consumer purchase decisions.

• There was a significant impact of different positioning brand LOGOs on consumers perceptions of quality. In luxury brands, the impact of LOGOs on consumers perception quality was extremely significant, and luxury brand LOGOs had a positive effect on product perception quality. However, the popular brand LOGOs does not have a positive effect on the perceived quality of the product. Compared with the popular brand LOGOs, the luxury brand LOGOs can greatly improve the quality of consumer perception.

The results of this study can rovide references for the different brand enterprises to use LOGOs to improve the perceived quality of consumers, promote purchasing behavior and improve economic efficiency. It is necessary for popular or low-end brands to create brand effects and establish brand images, and increase the added value of brand LOGO, so as to

improve the perceived quality of consumers and promote product sales and enterprise development.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors thank students of soochow university for their assistance with this research.

REFERENCES

[1] Wang Baolu, Analysis on the influence of consumer perception and the text logo of womens fashion brand, Beijing Institute Of Fashion Technology, 2012.

[2] William Dodds, Kent Monroe, and Dhruv Grewal, Effects of Price, Brand, and Store Information on Buyers' Product Evaluations, Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 28, No. 3, 1991, pp. 307-319.

[3] Montgomery C A and Wernerfelt B, Risk Reduction and Umbrella Branding, Journal of Business, vol. 65, No. 1, 1992, pp. 31-50.

[4] Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp, Conceptual model of the quality perception process, Journal of Business Research, vol. 21, No. 4, 1990, pp. 309-333.

[5] Marija Banovi, Klaus G. Grunert, Maria Madalena Barreira, and Magda Aguiar Fontes, Consumers quality perception of national branded, national store branded, and imported store branded beef, Meat Science, vol. 84, No. 1, 2010, pp. 54-65.

[6] Huang Yiqun, Features and application of apparel brand logo, soochow university, 2010.