公司層資訊對產品感知品質的影響機制探究 - 以中國汽車自主品牌為例

Abstract

In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China's macro economy has shown a vigorous and upward development, and China's manufacturing industry has become an important part of the global real economy under the influence of “late mover advantage”. No matter from the Economic Aggregate or the scale of China's manufacturing industry, the comprehensive strength gap between China and the world's developed countries is gradually narrowing. However, in terms of the performance of Chinese self-owned brands in the international market in recent years, the results are not satisfactory. Taking domestic auto brands as an example, the quality of some auto brands are on par with Korean cars. However, consumers still prefer foreign brands when choosing products, and their attitudes towards the quality of their domestic brands are still negative.

Starting from this realistic problem, this paper takes self-owned automobile brands as an example to explore the influential mechanism of domestic consumers on the perceived quality of Chinese brands. First of all, by combing the literature on perceived quality, we found that the influence of company-level information on perceived quality of products has been neglected. Based on existing empirical studies, we explored the influence of company-level information on product quality perception, purchase intention and recommendation intention, and the regulatory effect on firm type (strong firm vs. weak firm). Secondly, we found that due to the negative implicit attitude towards Chinese companies, consumers selectively process the presented company-level information out of defensiveness, and have doubts about the authenticity and accuracy of company-level information presented by Chinese companies, thus reducing the convincing effect of the company-level information. Finally, in order to improve the convincing effect of Chinese companies’ information, based on the attitude change model, this paper proposes the dual strategy of patriotic emotion marketing and company-level information display based on attitude change model to improve consumers' evaluation of product quality of Chinese companies.

The results confirm all the hypotheses and draw the following conclusions: (1) Compared with strong companies, weak companies' presentation of company-level information has greater impact on perceived product quality and company evaluation; (2) Because consumers hold negative implicit attitudes towards Chinese companies, for Chinese companies, displaying corporate capability information and corporate social responsibility information has limited impact on product quality and company evaluation; (3) In this case, patriotic emotion marketing improves consumers' evaluation of product quality and the company from emotional perspective. Therefore, Chinese companies can actively display information about their corporate capabilities and corporate social responsibility to consumers. At the same time, they should also promote consumers to have a positive evaluation of Chinese companies from the emotional level, such as patriotic emotion marketing.

Date of Award	21 Sept 2021
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Xiucheng FAN (External Supervisor) & Gang HAO (Supervisor)