중국 소비자의 유통업체상표에 대한 만족도의 선행요인에 관한 연구

Recently, as the attractiveness of retail markets within China increased, the intensity of competition has become severe creating a rational consuming environment. In order to respond to the rational consumers, Chinese retail marketers had to come up with a new market strategy for the changing environment. One of the considerable suggestion is to develop and refine private label brands (PB) to differentiate their merchandise for the consumers. The various prior researches have examined the role of PB and have addressed the ideas of how to develop PB and to drive their performances. However, there are at least two important limitations with existing approaches. First, they have been insufficient in providing understanding about the differentiation strategy in the environment considering competition among retailers. Even though having focused on the competition between PB and national brand product in certain store, they have failed to light the understanding inter-retailers competition in PB strategy. Second, they did not suggest the research frameworks relevant to manifest the specific market situation of China as an emerging market. Since retailers provide advanced offerings drastically, consumers in China are facing a changing purchasing environment and have a different decision-making process compared to other developed countries. Above twofold limitations of existing researches commonly lack the understanding of factors deriving PB performances in the specific market. Hence, the objectives of this study are to identify new antecedents of PB performances and examining the moderating effects of situational variables that affect the relationship between the PB performance and its antecedents in the Chinese retail market. The antecedents are divided into two parts; conventional and communicational antecedents. Conventional drivers consist of perceived quality and perceived price that are accommodated in many prior researches. Additionally, communication related drivers are separated into in-store promotion and peer group reputation. Most retailers are reluctant to invest the communication cost of PB, since it could induce efficient market performance without additional promotion efforts compared to national brands. In the market where the competition is becoming severe, retailers should pay more attention to well defined communication strategy as new way of cultivating PB performances. Communication can be divided into multifold based on the view point of store circumstances. The communications such as sales force recommendation, store facilities for information, and visual merchandising etc. are adopted as an in-store communication. The advisories or recommendations come from peer groups that is family, friends, and community members and such that are considered as an out-store communication. In addition, this research model considers the moderating effect of retailer's store image and consumer's perceived risk of PB on the relationship between PB satisfaction and its antecedents. Even though existing researches have focused the roles of these two constructs that might directly affect on PB performances, this research transforms their roles into moderators focusing on the perspective of PB merchandisers. There is the preposition that store image and perceived risk of consumer are kinds of given factors or uncontrollable areas for individual merchandisers. As such, research model has some hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 and 2 are the effects of conventional and communicational antecedents on PB performances. Hypothesis 3 is the relationship between PB performances. Hypothesis 4 and 5 are the moderating effects of store image and perceived risk in the relationship among antecedents and PB performances. The data were collected by the mall-intercept survey from customers of five big discount stores in metropolitan cities (Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hefei) in China. Before applying 284 questionnaires for analysis, the questionnaires were deleted since they omitted the answer seriously. The respondents were well representing the general consumer's characteristics of discount store by the reviewing the demographic attributes. After purifying the measuring instruments of constructs, hypotheses were tested with structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis. In the structural equation model for the hypothesis 1 to 3, the criteria of model fit goodness were revealed relevant enough and all path coefficients are significant excluding the path from in-store promotion to satisfaction. For the testing moderation effect, hierarchial regressions were adopted. The explaining variables were put into sequentially in order of independents, moderators and these interaction terms. The differentiations among R-squares of three hierarchical regressions show there are moderating effect of store image and perceived risk about PB on the relationship between perceived price and PB satisfaction and between in-store promotion and PB satisfaction. However, the moderating effects on the relationship between perceived quality and PB satisfaction and between peer group reputation and PB performance were not found.