Individual's Perceived Value And Materialism As Drivers To Self-Brand Integration And Brand Love For Smartphones In India

Abstract

Smartphones as a high involvement product has been gaining popularity in Indian markets since last decade. The smartphone market in India has been ever evolving and expanding with multiple brands rolling out their products in quick succession and upgrading the same over and over again. Smartphones have slowly taken the position of luxury items and consumers tend to put a lot of mental and physical effort in choosing a brand of smartphone. This makes the market a very busy and very competitive place. It is very difficult for the brands to stay on top of the minds of the consumers consistently and generate a positive sale. Hence it becomes necessary for the brands to have very strong association with the prospective consumers so as to create a long transactional journey with the consumers and also to bring new consumers on board. Brand Love and Self-Brand integration concepts which have been gaining popularity since a decade now and they have been very instrumental in bringing about a positive consumer relationship for certain product categories. The idea behind this research is to understand whether the consumers in Indian markets tend to relate brands with their self-identity and does the self-identity have a synergy in creating brand love or not. This research is a small attempt to uncover the probable latency in relationship between perceived value of a smart phone, its self-brand integration with the consumers and ultimately brand love. This study is made on 273 respondents from 4 major cities of Gujarat State of India and method of Regression analysis and Path coefficient is used to validate perceived value and consumer materialism as drivers to creating brand love.