Ridderspoor 2 7621AT Borne
E-mail: p.r.tapken@student.rug.nl
Phone number: 0031642057395
Student number: 1935097
The influence of visual impairment on the strength of brand personality associations .
A comparison between hedonic and utilitarian and tangible and intangible brands.
By
Peter Tapken University of Groningen Faculty of Economics and Business
Msc. Marketing management
13/04/2012
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PREFACE
Brand personality associations can change a consumer’s perception of products and research shows that consumers can even feel more masculine when riding a Harley Davidson or more feminine when wearing Victoria’s Secret. Brand associations are used as marketing instruments and can be used to differentiate from competitors. Marketing literature states that to create strong brand associations consumers must see the product and/or advertising. I found it personally interesting to investigate what the influence is of visual impairment on brand personality associations. No such branding experiments have been done by comparing visually impaired with sighted to research the influence of visual stimuli.
I found that visual stimuli not only have a direct role but also a supporting role in the creation of strong brand personality associations. This means that without visual stimuli it is harder to create brand personality associations (direct role) and that visual stimuli influence the function of tangible product characteristics (supporting role) on brand personality associations.
Visual stimuli are therefore a requisite for the creation of brand personality associations. If visual stimuli have a more direct or supporting role in the creation of brand personality associations is unclear and I would like to recommend other researchers to research the influences of senses, and in particular vision, on brand personality associations. As a future brand manager winning the consumer’s attention is a big challenge and my findings on this topic will help me in future branding choices.
I would like to thank my supervisor dr. K.J Alsem for his support, help and constructive feedback during the process of writing this thesis. I would also like to thank the people from the Ziezo convention to allow me to collect data and of course the respondents who were so kind to help me with my thesis.
Kind regards,
Peter Tapken, 13/04/2012
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TABLE OF CONTENT
1.INTRODUCTION ... 4
1.1COMPETITION ON MARKETING MESSAGES ... 5
1.2THE DOMINANCE OF VISION ... 5
1.3HEDONIC AND UTILITARIAN BRANDS ... 6
1.4INFLUENCE OF HAPTIC BRAND CHARACTERISTICS ... 7
1.5THE RESEARCH QUESTION ... 8
2.LITERATURE REVIEW ... 9
2.1WHAT ARE BRANDS?... 9
2.2BRANDS AS SELF-EXPRESSION ... 10
2.3 THE INFLUENCE OF VISUAL STIMULI ... 12
2.4VISUAL IMPAIRMENT ... 15
2.5HEDONIC VS UTILITARIAN ... 17
3.CONCEPTUAL MODEL ... 21
4.METHODOLOGY ... 22
4.1TYPE OF RESEARCH ... 22
4.2QUALITATIVE RESEARCH... 22
4.3QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH ... 25
5.RESULTS ... 30
5.1DIMENSION AND CONSTRUCT DEVELOPMENT ... 30
5.2HYPOTHESIS TESTING ... 32
6.DISCUSSION ... 37
6.1SIGHTED HAVE STRONGER BRAND PERSONALITY ASSOCIATIONS THAN VISUALLY IMPAIRED ... 37
6.2DIFFERENCES IN THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED GROUPS ... 39
6.3VISION AND HEDONIC AND UTILITARIAN BRANDS ... 40
6.4VISION AND TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE BRANDS ... 41
7.CONCLUSIONS ... 44
7.1MAIN CONCLUSIONS ... 44
7.2MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS ... 45
7.3LIMITATIONS... 47
7.4FUTURE RESEARCH ... 47
APPENDIX ... 55
APPENDIX 1:QUALITATIVE RESEARCH – AWARENESS TEST ... 56
APPENDIX 2:QUALITATIVE RESEARCH – INTERVIEWS ... 59
APPENDIX 3: NUMBER OF BRANDS TEST... 61
APPENDIX 4:SURVEY (IN DUTCH) ... 63
APPENDIX 5:FREQUENCIES ... 68
APPENDIX 6:HEDONIC/UTILITARIAN CORRELATION COMPETENCE... 69
APPENDIX 7:STRENGTH OF BRAND DIMENSIONS ... 70
APPENDIX 8:SPSS OUTCOMES H1,2A AND 2B ... 71
APPENDIX 8: SPSS OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS 2C ... 72
APPENDIX 9: SPSS OUTPUT HYPOTHESIS 3 ... 73
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ABSTRACT
In this thesis is investigated what the influence is of visual impairment on brand personality strength. Visual stimuli are important influencers for the creation of brand personality associations. This is important because strong brand personality associations influence consumer’s perception. Hypothesized was that brand personality associations for people with most sighted ability are the strongest. To test this, a distinction was made between blind from birth, late blind, badly sighed and sighted respondents. Hypothesized was also that brand personality associations for hedonic brands are stronger than for utilitarian brands. To test this, a distinction is also made between hedonic and utilitarian brands because research showed that visual stimuli are particularly important for hedonic brands. The last hypothesis was that because of the visually impairment, visually impaired people need to rely more on tangible brand characteristics and therefore tangible brands should have stronger brand personality associations.
To test these hypotheses four brands were chosen. Two brands were primarily hedonic and the other two primarily utilitarian. Three of these four brands were tangible and one intangible. A combination of hedonic and utilitarian brand scales was used to test the brand personality associations.
The main result was that visual experience and sight influence brand personality association strength. Hypothesized was also that due to compensation efforts visually impaired people need to rely more on the remaining senses and that tangible brand characteristics should become have more on brand personality association strength. The finding was however that sight and/or visual experience have a direct and a facilitating role on the influence of the other senses. Thus, people needs to see and feel a product to create strong brand personality associations.
An important managerial recommendation is that visual stimuli are still important influencers for visually impaired people. For badly sighted visual stimuli can still be used as a marketing instrument. More research needs to be done on the influence of impairment of other senses to better understand the influence of senses on formation of brand personality associations.
Keywords: visual stimuli, visual impairment, brand personality, brands, hedonic, utilitarian, tangible brands.
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1.INTRODUCTION
Allison and Uhl (1964) found in a blind beer tasting study that people were not able to discern taste difference without brands. However, with brands differences were perceived. A more recent study by Maison, Greenwald and Bruin (2004) also showed the importance of brands by stating that people prefer Coca Cola when the brand name is given but prefer Pepsi Cola in a ‘blind study’. Seeing the brand thus influences brand perception and helps people to distinguish between brands. Visual stimuli are particularly important influencers for advertising success (Brasel and Gips, 2008) and it are these brand associations that influence people’s perception and differentiate between brands.
Branding studies (Aaker, 1997; Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003) furthermore show that people have little problems naming human characteristics with brands. Consumers can perceive a brand to be human and can be perceived as an acquaintance. The concept of having human personality traits with a brand is called brand personality. Park and Roedder-John (2010) even showed that human characteristics of a brand ‘can rub’ off on a consumer. This means that someone can feel more masculine when riding a Harley Davidson or more feminine when wearing Victoria’s secret.
Brand personality associations influence consumers and multiple authors (Chitturi, Raghunathan and Mahajan, 2008; Feiereisen, Wong and Broderick, 2008; Brasel and Gips, 2008) state that visual stimuli are important influencers for these brand personality associations. An interesting question is what the influence of visual stimuli exactly is. In these studies a comparison was always made between sighted groups to show the importance of visual stimuli. Excluding the influence of visual stimuli is however difficult because sighted people are always influenced by other visual factors that have or have had influenced their brand personality associations. To exclude the influence of visual stimuli on brand personality association this study takes a unique entry point. A comparison is made between visually impaired and sighted people to test the influence of visual impairment on brand personality association strength. Without the influence of visual stimuli brand personality associations may change and become weaker. This has however never been researched. The question that started this thesis was the following;
Thesis question: Is there a difference in brand personality strength between sighted and visually impaired people?
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The unique outcomes of this study help to better understand the visual sense and the influence of visual impairment on brand personality association strength. Better understanding how visual stimuli influence consumers can lead to relevant managerial information for marketers that can be used for future marketing strategies and/or research.
1.1COMPETITION ON MARKETING MESSAGES
Better understanding how the visual sense works is relevant because visual stimuli have a profound effect on brand personality associations. Marketers constantly try to win the consumer’s attention but this is getting increasingly difficult due to visual competition. Visual competition on marketing messages has increased over the last years and for marketers it is getting increasingly complex to convey marketing messages to their target audience. In 1963, according to the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 34 percent of the consumers in the USA could name the brand of a commercial aired during a show. Thirty years later only eight percent were capable of doing this (Lindstrom, 2005). Despite of this increase in visual marketing messages there is still a one-to-one correlation between the deployment of specific visual operations in advertising discourse and the response of consumers to the advertisement (Oswald, 2010).
1.2THE DOMINANCE OF VISION
For sighted people visual stimuli are dominant over the other senses (Colavita, 1974). There is however no literature stating that visual impairment significantly influences brand perception. On the contrary, blind research states that there is no reason to expect that with the exception of visual components the mental experience of blind people is any less rich or varied than that of sighted people (Kerr, 1983). It seems to be true that no distinct differences exist in blind people’s perception of their surroundings and it seems that blind people are quite good in interpreting their surroundings in the way the sighted ‘see’ them. Obasogie (2010) found that blind people’s understanding of race is as significant as their sighted counterparts and that blind from birth people ‘understand race visually’. The interesting aspect of these outcomes is that it could be possible that visually impaired people still have strong brand personality associations. This could imply that visually impaired people use their compensation abilities for their impairment to create brand personality associations. Visually impaired people may compensate by relying on other senses than sight for the creation of brand personality associations.
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Visual stimuli are dominant but do not have to be a requisite for customer loyalty. Lindstrom (2005) states that all senses affect brand loyalty except for vision, which did not contribute to having a great experience. He concluded that although vision has a less powerful influence on brand loyalty than other senses, it does play a strong supporting role. Therefore, it is interesting to research what happens with brand personality association strength when this strong role of visual stimuli disappears.
Visual attention is nevertheless a key driver of advertising success, and advertising effectiveness may occur only when people directly attend to the brand information. Visual cues serve to create the context in which products are shown (Wang and Muehling, 2010) and brand exposure, although brief, can lead to an increased positive affect for future brand interactions (Brasel and Gips, 2008).
1.3HEDONIC AND UTILITARIAN BRANDS
Hedonic brands focus on the fun, emotive and enjoyment aspects whereas utilitarian brands focus on the functional use (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). Especially pictorial stimuli are important for hedonic consumption (Holbrook and Moore, 1981) and hedonic brand marketers primarily use visual stimuli (Chitturi et al., 2008; Feiereisen et al., 2008) to convey brand associations. A visual impairment may therefore influence hedonic brands more than utilitarian brands.
Chitturi et al. (2008) state that especially luxury hedonic products such as fashion or fragrances use highly visual advertising such as billboard and TV advertisements to promote their brand. Typical utilitarian product producers such as salt, sugar or detergents use less visual stimuli to promote their products. For a brand manager working on brands for visually impaired people it is interesting to see if there is a difference in strength of brand personality associations between hedonic and utilitarian brands. This, because marketing practice for sighted people adapts marketing strategies to hedonic and utilitarian brands. It is interesting to see if this difference between hedonic and utilitarian products also exists for visually impaired consumers.
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1.4INFLUENCE OF HAPTIC BRAND CHARACTERISTICS
Visually impaired people need to compensate for their impairment and therefore need to rely more on other senses to make judgments. Lindstrom (2005) and Pieters, Wedel and Batra (2010) state that other senses than the visual sense are important influencers of the customer’s experience. For a computer mouse for example, touch is the most dominant sense and not vision (Peck and Wiggens, 2006). To test what the influence of the tangible nature of a brand is, a comparison is also made for this distinction. It could be that because of the visual impairment, visually impaired people rely more on the tangible than on the intangible characteristics of a brand to make brand judgments.
1.5MANAGERIAL RELEVANCE
It is possible that visually impaired people compensate for their impairment and that therefore a comparison between sighted and visually impaired people is asymmetrical. Excluding compensation effects of the other senses is practically impossible and it is unclear how big the asymmetry is between the sighted and the visually impaired group. A conclusion that the absence of visual stimuli solely causes the difference in brand personality strength between visually impaired and sighted people may therefore be premature. This study nevertheless provides new information and despite of this limitation the results of this study can be useful for future research on the visual sense and the influence of visual impairment on brand personality association strength.
Different degrees of visual impairment
Another interesting question is if there are differences for different degrees of visual impairment (blind from birth, late blind, and badly sighted). Differences between visually impaired and sighted people have often been found in academic research (Postma, Zuidhoek and Noordzij, 2007) and the assumption was that respondents that have had sight (late blind) and/or can still see (badly sighted) have stronger brand personality associations than blind from birth respondents. Finding differences between these groups is interesting for marketing managers working in the visual impaired field because adapted marketing strategies for visually impaired groups could be more effective than targeting the visually impaired group as one. This is therefore the first managerial goal.
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Managerial goal 1: Is there a difference in brand personality association strength for different degrees of visual impairment?
Especially for hedonic brands visual stimuli are used and visual impairment could lead to a difference in brand personality association strength (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Chitturi et al., 2008; Feiereisen et al., 2008). It is however unclear if this is also relevant for visually impaired consumers. This therefore the second managerial goal.
Managerial goal 2: Should marketers make a distinction between hedonic and utilitarian brands when targeting visually impaired consumers?
Lindstrom (2005) and Pieters, Wedel and Batra (2010) state that other senses than the visual sense are important influencers of the customer’s experience. For a computer mouse for example, touch is the most dominant sense and not vision (Peck and Wiggens, 2006). It is possible that visually impaired people rely more on tangible brand characteristics to make brand judgments. This is managerial relevant information for marketers because this can imply that marketers need to emphasize the tangible brand characteristics more for visually impaired people. This managerial goal is for this reason also included in this study.
Managerial goal 3: Should marketers make a distinction between tangible and intangible brands when targeting visually impaired consumers?
1.5THE RESEARCH QUESTION
With the results of this study a marketing manager knows that branding strategies work similar for visually impaired people or show that this group is different to the degree that other marketing strategies need to be adapted and/or developed. In addition to the direct contribution to managerial practice, marketing researchers can use this information as a basis for further research to better understand the influence of visual impairment on brand personality associations and better understand the working of the visual sense.
This thesis and managerial questions combined form the following research question which this paper will answer:
What is the influence of visual impairment on brand personality association strength and how do the hedonic/utilitarian nature and the tangible/intangible nature of a brand influence this relationship?
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2.LITERATURE REVIEW
In the literature review the necessary literature to answer the hypotheses, the research question and the research goals is discussed. This literature review starts with a definition of brands (2.1). In the following section (2.2) the concept of brand personality is discussed followed by the influence of visual stimuli (2.3). After this visual impairment is discussed (2.4) followed by hedonic vs. utilitarian brands (2.5). In chapter 3 the conceptual framework that is the results of the literature review will be displayed.
2.1WHAT ARE BRANDS?
A commonly used definition of brand is given by the American Marketing Association (Keller, 2008), who define a brand as: “a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from competitors”. Researchers apply a brand to a corporate entity, a public perception, a repository of information, a financial outcome, or perhaps all at once (Stern, 2006). Brands may be defined from the consumers' perspective and/or from the brand owner's perspective. Some researchers treat brands in terms of firms' financial outcomes of brand equity (Ailawadi, Lehmann, and Neslin, 2003), while others state that a brand is defined as consumer’s collection of perceptions (Fournier, 1998). Ambler (1992) takes a consumer-oriented approach in defining a brand as: “the promise of the bundles of attributes that someone buys and provides satisfaction”.
Many other brand definitions and descriptions focus on the methods used to achieve differentiation and/or emphasize the benefits the consumer derives from purchasing brands.
These include definitions and descriptions that emphasize brands as an image in the consumers' minds (Franzen, 1990), as a brand personality (Aaker, 1996; Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003), as value systems (Sheth, Newman and Gross, 1991), and as added value (Lubin, Levitt and Zuckerman, 1962).
The goal of this study is to find differences in strength of brand personality associations for different types of brands and different types of visual impairments. In this light, the best applicable definition of brands is as an “image in the consumers” minds” (Franzen, 1990). A product is the physical aspect and is part of the overall brand – the association the product evokes. Therefore a product is part of the brand but a product itself is not the brand.
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2.2BRANDS AS SELF-EXPRESSION
Dolich (1969) found as early as 1963 that individual behavior is regulated by each person’s similarities (or dissimilarities) with their self image. Dolich states that the products and brands people use and buy are an expression of the self in relation to their environment. A brand is presenting itself to the world in many ways – through the product itself, its packaging, its name, its employees and so on. Brands communicate something and the world on the other hand interprets brands through many different filters; through experience, perceptions, misconceptions, value system and, of course, the noise in the system (Plummer, 1984). Any brand can be described in terms of three different classes of characteristics; a) physical attributes (Rang is an orange drink that comes in a bottle and cost 80 cents, b) functional characteristics; lemon-freshened Pledge polishes your furniture, c) characterization; the brand personality (Kleine, Schultz-Kleine and Kernan, 1993)
The self-concept
Individuals tend to favor brands similar to their self concept. The self includes beliefs about if we are brave or cowardly, extravert or introvert, and these beliefs shape the attention, encoding, and retrieval of information (Wheeler, Petty and Bizer, 2005). Most scholars seem to agree that the term “self-concept” denotes the totality of the individual’s thoughts, beliefs and feelings (Sirgy, 1982). The self- a sense of who and what we are - is suggested as an organizing construct through which people’s everyday activities can be understood (Kleine et al., 1993). The ordinary products we use in day-to-day situations are self-expressive; what we have for breakfast, what we wear to work, and whether to read or watch TV tonight are not dramatic considerations but they present us with congruity issues nonetheless. The products we consume reflect our identity – our sense of who and what we are (Kleine et al., 1993).
Kleine et al. (1993) state that the social roles we ascribe to ourselves are the basis of our social identities and our overall sense of who we are. External social influences (e.g. reference groups) play a more important role in determining who we are than internal processes. In modern life we learn, define, and remind ourselves of whom we are by our possessions. Loss of possession can lead to a change in the way people perceive themselves.
Self-schemata works in the same way as other organizational cognitive structures and acts as perceptual filters to determine which information is important to selectively attend to and elaborate on and which information is not. Self-schemata can also increase message
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elaboration – it fits me and therefore I pay more attention to it. Individuals who reported that recycling was a function of their self-concept are more likely to recycle in their homes.
Individuals prefer things associated to the self and even something silly as the first letters of someone’s name has a positive influence on the judgment of that person (Wheeler, et al., 2005). Congruity influences attitudes of retail brands (Helgeson and Supphellen, 2004), consumer products (Dolich, 1969) and even people with the same name as you in a positive way.
Self-congruity and brand personality
Dolich (1969) already stated that people tend to choose brands that are consistent with their self-image. Individuals who consider themselves for example rugged, prefer rugged products or activities (e.g. hunting trip). Park and Roeder-John (2001) found that brand personality
“rubs off” on consumers which means that consumers can feel different when using a brand.
Someone can for example feel more masculine when riding a Harley Davidson or more feminine when wearing Victoria’s secret.
Self-congruity means how much a customer’s self-concept matches the personality of a typical user of a brand. Aaker (1997) defines brand personality as: “the set of human characteristics associated with the brand”. Self-congruity proposes that part of consumer behavior is determined by an individual’s comparison of the image of themselves and the image of a brand, as reflected in a stereotype of a typical user of a brand (Helgeson and Supphellen, 2004). Helgeson and Supphellen (2004) even go as far to state that the personality of a brand is indicated vicariously through the personality characteristics of a typical user of a brand. The personality/image of a typical user of the brand is believed to be reflective of the brand.
People can use brands as an attempt to enhance their sense of self – change their perceptions about themselves after using a brand. Buying a Harley Davidson for example is in this case not only an expression of the self (ruggedness) but can also enhances the consumer’s self image (I feel more rugged after riding my Harley). The same principle applies for Victoria’s Secret - women can feel more glamorous, good-looking, and feminine.
Individuals can perceive their personal qualities as malleable – change through own efforts – or can believe that their personal qualities are fixed – cannot improve through own effort -. In the first case personal qualities can be improved if they exert effort to do so and seek therefore
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ways to become a better person through opportunities for learning, self-improvement, and growth. If personal qualities are fixed people seek out opportunities to signal their positive qualities to themselves or others. People engage in experiences that are consistent with their preferred way to self-enhance. If people believe that their personal qualities are fixed these experiences will lead to more positive self-perceptions. In this scenario brand personalities really do rub off this group of consumers (Park and Roedder-John, 2010). They feel for example more intelligent, hardworking and a leader after using an MIT pen. In malleable scenarios this does not occur.
For decades researchers have argued that brand personality is an important topic of study because it can help to differentiate brands and augment the personal meaning of a brand to the consumer. In practice, the personification of brands has happened frequently since celebrities started to endorse brands (Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003). Consumers could perceive congruence between their perceived selves and the endorser and, as a result, form an attraction to the brand. Consumers have no problem perceiving a brand as a person and in fact, consumers perceive brands as having personality traits (Aaker, 1996).
2.3 THE INFLUENCE OF VISUAL STIMULI
today’s brand communication is for 99 percent focused on what we hear and see. When American consumers reach the age of 65 they have been exposed to over two million television commercials. Marketers of today have an increasingly difficult task to fight the visual saturation of and need to become more creative to catch the consumer’s eye. According to the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, in 1963 34 percent of consumers in the USA could name the brand of a commercial aired during a show. Thirty years later only eight percent were capable of doing this (Lindstrom, 2005).
For many years it has been claimed that not all the senses contribute equally to our perception and in particular that vision is the dominant sense. Some stimuli however are more likely to be attended to than others. Colavita (1974) showed that the visual sense of the spectrum of senses is dominant. In Colavita’s participants were presented with tone signal (audition) and light signals (visual modality) simultaneously and participants responded more to visual than to auditory input. In a later study Lukas, Philipp and Koch (2010) showed that when visual and auditory information come into conflict, the conflict is resolved in favor of the visual modality. Witten and Knudsen (2005) even state that visual information has more efficacious connections in the human brain. During a simple conversation, one listens to the sound of
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speech while watching the lip movement of the dialogue partner or while registering his/her facial expression. In this case there is an assumed processing advantage of vision compared to other sensory modalities (Lukas et al., 2010).
Visual dominance also exists in perception of space (Witten and Knudsen, 2005), dominance in perceptual and memorial reports and in speeded responses (Posner, Nissen and Klein, 1976), judgments of size (Rock and Victor, 1964), visual dominance under more complex stimulation conditions (Sinnet, Spence and Soto-Foraco, 2007), visual dominance exist in more visual-only responses than auditory-only responses (Sinnet, Soto-Foraco and Spence, 2008), preferential use of visual stimulus and a visual lead in processing (Shapiro, Barrett, and Ollendick, 1980).
Hughes and Nicholson (2010) furthermore state that voices are generally more difficult to recognize than faces. The visual recognition processing is superior to auditory recognition processing. Tangible characteristics also influence perception and remarkably people can even feel the touch of a brush when they wear a rubber globe (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998).
Apparently seeing a brush touching their hand (even in a rubber glove) is enough to ‘feel’ the touch of a brush. Sinnet et al. (2008) state that the literature on multisensory perception clearly shows that the behavioral consequences of multisensory interaction can range from facilitation on the one hand to competition on the other. Sensory dominance of one modality can lead to the apparent extinction of auditory stimuli when simultaneously presented together with visual stimuli.
Advertising and the visual modality
Vision is often the dominant sense, but how do visual stimuli relate to branding? Wang and Muehling (2010) stated that visual cues serve to create the context in which products are shown. Audio-visual cues can serve to enhance visual-only delivered information. This facilitates stronger brand associations than visual-only information. Audio-visual cues can facilitate a link between the co-brands featured in a co-branded advertisement. Wang and Muehling (2010) state that as the link is recognized and strengthened, it can increase elaboration of co-branded advertisements. Audio-visual information is more meaningful than visual-only information And when the auditory modality was used with the visual modality, advertising information was learned better.
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Tangible brand characteristics
Visual perception is enhanced when the presentation of visual stimuli is combined with auditory events. Krishna (2006) states that when the visual sense is available to consumers for making volume judgments, larger objects are preferred. Marketing managers try to make taller containers in order for the containers to appear larger. Vision dominates touch for volume judgment and in branding the other sensory modalities cannot be ignored. Spence and Gallace (2011) stated that after the eye, the hand is the first censor to pass on acceptance. If the hand’s judgment is unfavorable even the most attractive object will not gain the popularity it deserves. Advertising needs to stop consumers and their attention in likable ways, “where the eye stops, the sale begins” (Pieters et al., 2010). Lindstrom (2005) and Pieters et al. (2010) state that other senses than the visual sense are important influencers of the customer’s experience. People have argued for many years that what a product feels like can influence whether or not people will end up buying it. An expensive piece of jewelry or a watch is at first glance appreciated visually, but our final purchase decision often comes only after we have handled it. In the last few years, more than 30% of the world’s largest brands have been working on sensory branding strategies (Johnson, 2007). Because of rising media noise due to competing advertisements and active ad avoidance by consumers it has become increasingly challenging for firms to visually differentiate themselves from competitors.
Schifferstein and Desmet (2007) showed that people report stronger alienation when touch was denied than when sight was denied. The way sighted people perceive their environment is highly dependent on their ability to see and marketers should not underestimate the influence of the other senses. They should realize that these tangible characteristics can also be strong influencers. Nevertheless, being visually impaired may lead to differences in product/brand perception.
Brand exposure
Research has shown that previous exposure to stimuli can increase people’s subsequent preference for those stimuli (a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect). Brand exposure, although brief, can lead to increased positive affect for future brand interactions (Brasel and Gips, 2008). Much of the branding could fall outside viewers’ visual attention, and advertising effectiveness may occur only when consumers directly attend to the brand information. Therefore marketers must ensure that their brand information is centrally located to prompt the necessary visual processing for brand memory and recognition.
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2.4VISUAL IMPAIRMENT
Sighted people can make equal use of visual and non-visual imagery to generate future events.
This suggests that nonvisual sensory imageries, as well as visual imagery, have an important role to play in everyday tasks (Eardley and Pring, 2006). Eardley and Pring (2006) found that visually impaired or sighted people were all using imagery to facilitate the generation of possible future events. Those born with sight and without sight use sensory images to generate memory and –irrespective of visual experience- imagery. Verbal processes are not crucial for the retrieval of memories and the way in which the future is imagined or planned for.
Williams, Healy and Ellis (1999) have suggested that only visual images facilitate memory retrieval. Individuals born without sight should therefore rely on other sensory modalities to retrieve memory (Goddard and Pring, 2001). Surely, people blind from birth have no visual experience and should therefore be incapable of creating specific visual imagery. They should therefore rely more on coding and processing spatial information (Kerr, 1983). This makes instinctive sense and a regular assumption is that the visually impaired people’s associations are different than those of sighted people. According to Kerr (1983), blind from birth people describe dream settings with specific spatial characteristics such as the size and shape of a room and the location and orientation of objects and people in the environment. Kerr (1983) showed that patterns of performance on imagery tasks are similar to those of sighted people in almost all respects (excluding the visual part). The most important conclusion from this study is that the critical performance measures in these three imagery tasks are not uniquely dependent on the visual processing system. Kerr (1983) stated that there is no reason to expect that, with the exception of visual components the mental experience of blind people is any less rich or varied than that of the sighted.
It could be true that no distinct differences exist in visually impaired people’s perception of the environment and that visually impaired people are quite good in interpreting their surroundings. Obasogie (2010) found that blind people’s understanding of race is as significant as their sighted counterparts and that blind from birth people understand race visually. Blind from birth people’s visual understanding of race stems from social practices that train people to think about race visually regardless of their ability to see. Blind people create a visual distinction in a conceptual way and organize their lives around visual understandings of racial difference.
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How does this relate to brands?
This is of course interesting but how does this relate to branding? In the US congenially blind people have laden associations with black or white doctors and can even have a preference for a black or white doctor (Obasogie, 2010). Blind from birth people’s understanding of race stems from social practices but no research has been done about brands on this aspect. The sighted consumers are constantly influenced by their visual stimuli when making purchase decisions.
A classical example of this is the ‘blind’ beer tasting study by Allison and Uhl (1964) that showed that people are not able to discern the taste differences among various beer brands.
Apparently labels and their associations did influence their evaluations. Especially the brand name is one of their most important assets (Keller, 2008) and is an instrument to differentiate from competitors.
For the majority of the products, vision is most important for product evaluations (Schifferstein and Desmet, 2007) and vision gathers product aspects more rapidly than touch.
There seems to be a difference in the way the senses are used. Vision mainly plays a functional role whereas tactual information can play a functional and an affective role. More importantly; a marketer’s goal is always to create loyalty (Keller, 2008) and vision is less influential on loyalty than the other senses. For a computer mouse for example, the touch is the most dominant sense and not vision (Peck and Wiggens, 2006). Without touch, it is hard to create a personal relationship with a product and products feel less like “our own” and can feel “foreign”. Peck and Wiggens (2006) state that touching a product increases attitudes and influences purchase intentions towards a product, which is particularly important for sales promotions and retailing. Although there are differences between consumers, especially for hedonic products there is a “need for touch” (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998). This means that tangible brand characteristics are particularly important influencers on hedonic brand perception.
Visual stimuli are often used to convey brand associations, but for building brand loyalty or affective feelings visual stimuli are not enough (Lindstrom, 2005; Pieters et al., 2010).
Without vision the product experience deteriorates (Schifferstein and Desmet, 2007; Brasel and Gips, 2008) and therefore visual stimuli still remain a strong influencer of brand personality associations.
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Differences in visual impairment
The term visual impairment is ambiguous and in studies on visually impaired people a distinction is often made between early blind (< 3 years old), late blind (>3 years old) and badly sighted (Postma, Zuidhoek, Noordzij and Kappers, 2008). Differences were reported between blind and sighted participants on a visual-imagery and on a spatial-imagery task, but not on an auditory-imagery task. For the visual-imagery task, participants had to compare object forms on the basis of a (verbally presented) object name. Interestingly, there was a difference between early-blind and late-blind participants on the visual-imagery and the spatial-imagery tasks: late-blind participants made more errors than sighted people on the visual-imagery task, while blind from birth participants made more errors than sighted people on the spatial-imagery task.
Kaski (2002) showed that blind from birth people are able to generate images and that damage to early stages of visual processing may have little effect upon imagery. Retrieving visual imagery should make no difference between blind from birth, late blind and badly sighted if we follow Kaski (2002).
In short, the degree of visual impairment does not have to lead to a difference in visual imagery. However, for brand associations visual stimuli have a very important influence in brand perception and the absence of this sense may have an effect. Therefore, despite the statement that visual impairment does not lead to a decline in visual imagery, there can be a difference between these groups. This difference should be the biggest for the blind from birth group and the smallest for the badly sighted group. This leads to the following hypothesis.
Hypothesis 1: The degree of visual impairment influences brand personality strength negatively.
2.5HEDONIC VS UTILITARIAN
Chitturi et al. (2008) state that especially luxury hedonic products such as fashion or fragrances use highly visual advertising such as billboard and TV advertisements to promote their product. Typical utilitarian product producers such as salt, sugar or detergents promote their products less with marketing focused on visual stimuli. It is interesting to see if this difference between hedonic and utilitarian products also exists for visually impaired consumers.
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By nature, people are motivated to enjoy themselves (Dhar and Wertenbroch, 2000; Okada, 2005). These authors state that consumer choices are driven by utilitarian and hedonic considerations. Products can have utilitarian and hedonic attributes, for example new automobiles consumers may care about utilitarian features (e.g. gas mileage) as well as about hedonic attributes (e.g. sporty design). Consumption of products has hedonic and utilitarian features but there is little doubt that consumers characterize some products as primarily hedonic and others as primarily utilitarian. Hedonic goods provide more experiential consumption, fun, pleasure, and excitement (designer clothes, sports cars, watches), whereas utilitarian goods are primarily instrumental and functional (microwaves, minivans, personal computers, etc). Chitturi et al. (2008) argue that luxuries are typically hedonic in nature and that necessities are typically utilitarian in terms of the benefits they offer to consumers.
Luxuries can also be viewed as wants (luxuries–wants–hedonic benefits) and utilitarian as needs (necessities–needs–utilitarian benefits).
Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) were one of the first to define hedonic consumption as a steady flow of fantasies, feelings, and fun encompassed by what we call the "experiential view." The experience view emphasized the importance of consumption with the pleasure principle. A store environment for example can contribute to sensory, emotional and cognitive stimulation which enhances the hedonic experience (Fiore, Jin and Kim, 2005). This type of consumption seeks fun, amusement, fantasy, arousal, sensory stimulation, and enjoyment with a whole range of emotions such as love, hate, fear, joy, boredom, anxiety, pride, anger, disgust, sadness, sympathy, lust, ecstasy, greed, guilt, elation, shame, and awe. Babin, Darden and Griffin (1994) have a similar definition of hedonic consumption and state that expressions of pure enjoyment, excitement, captivation, escapism, and spontaneity are fundamental aspects of hedonic shopping value. In comparison, utilitarian shopping value includes expressions of accomplishment and/or disappointment over the ability (inability) to complete the shopping task.
Despite the fact that all products can be hedonically experienced by consumers, those upon which research has been focused deserve special attention because of their capacity to generate unusually strong emotional involvement. Hedonic goods are the ones whose consumptions are primarily characterized by an affective and sensory experience of aesthetic or sensual pleasure, fantasy, and fun. Hedonic consumptions designate those facets of consumer behavior that relate to the multisensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of one’s experience with products and that the experience of all the sensory modalities influences
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consumer response. For example, smelling a perfume may cause the consumer not only to perceive and encode its scent but also to generate internal imagery containing sights, sounds and tactile sensations, all of which are also "experienced."
Visual stimuli and hedonic consumption
Especially hedonic brand marketers use visual stimuli (Chitturi et al., 2008; Feiereisen et al., 2008) to convey brand associations. Pictorial stimuli appear to be particularly important in hedonic consumption (Holbrook and Moore, 1981). The use of pictorials may be more appropriate to convey information for hedonic products as opposed to utilitarian products.
Those pictures have a superiority effect over words on learning (Feiereisen et al., 2008).
Affective pictures can even change the perception of painful stimuli (Godinho et al., 2006).
Oswald (2010) states that there is a one-to-one correlation between the deployment of specific visual operations in advertising discourse and the response of consumers to the advertisement, and this kind of correlation has been often documented in consumer testing. It is further believed that mental activity activated by hedonic products are predominantly right brain orientated. The capacity for responding to visual-spatial stimuli and emotion laden events is believed to be focused in this part of the brain (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982).
If we follow these authors, visual stimuli are an important influencer for hedonic consumption.
Visual impairment may therefore lead to a big difference in hedonic consumption and a smaller difference in utilitarian consumption. Blind from birth have the ‘highest’ degree of visual impairment followed by late blind and badly sighted respondents. This leads to the following hypotheses.
Hypothesis 2a: The degree of visual impairment influences hedonic brand personality strength negatively.
Hypothesis 2b: The degree of visual impairment influences utilitarian brand personality strength negatively.
Hypothesis 2c: The difference in strength between hedonic and utilitarian brand personality associations becomes greater when the degree of visual impairment increases.
There is strong need for touch (Peck and Wiggens, 2006). Blocking vision results in the largest loss of functional information and sensory impairment changes the way people experience products (Schifferstein and Desmet, 2007). Because visually impaired people need
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to rely more on other senses than sight, visually impaired people might compensate by relying more on tangible brand characteristics. Because visually impaired people rely more on their haptic (touch) ability brand personality associations may be stronger for tangible than for intangible brands. This leads to the following hypotheses.
Hypothesis 3a: The degree of visual impairment influences the strength of tangible brand personality associations more than the strength of intangible brand personality associations.
Hypothesis 3b: The degree of visual impairment influences the strength of tangible brand personality associations more than for sighted people.
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3. Conceptual model
The research question and hypotheses are combined in the following conceptual model.
FIGURE 1 Conceptual Model
Visual impairment
Hedonic/ utilitarian brands
Tangible/ Intangible brands
Strength of brand personality associations
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4. Methodology
This methodology is divided in a qualitative and a quantitative section. The qualitative research was conducted to test assumptions that remained unclear from the literature review.
Quantitative research was conducted to find measurable differences and test the hypotheses to reach the managerial goals. This methodology continues with the discussion of the type of research followed by the qualitative research and the quantitative research.
4.1TYPE OF RESEARCH
This study started with the thesis question - is there a difference in brand personality strength between sighted and visually impaired respondents? - and the three managerial goals discussed in the introduction. The thesis question leads to new insights on the influence of visual impairment on brand personality associations and can therefore be defined as explorative (Malhotra, 2007). However, for the managerial goals comparisons between visually impaired groups and different type of brands are made that can help a manager to determine and select a best course of action. Therefore this research can also be defined as conclusive research (Malhotra, 2007). The quantitative nature of this study requires measurable data and therefore this study is part quantitative. However, before quantitative research could be conducted qualitative research was done fist.
4.2QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Qualitative research was conducted to test two assumptions from the literature review that remained unclear. First no literature was found on the question if visually impaired people are aware of brands and second it was unclear if visually impaired people have brand personality associations. The first assumption was tested with a brand awareness test and the second assumption with open interviews. This section continues with the research group definitions followed by the brand awareness test and the open interviews.
Research group definitions: Several studies on visually impaired people make a distinction between blind from birth, blind after three years, badly sighted and sighted respondents and test 20 participants per group (Postma et al., 2007). In this study the same design is used to show differences between the four groups. Because overlap between these groups is possible these groups are closely defined. In this study a respondent born with less than 5% sight is defined as blind from birth. A respondent is late blind when sight gradually deteriorated and
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currently has less than 5% sight but had more than 5% sight after the age of three. Badly sighted is defined as having more than 5% sight but less than 100% sight.
Brand awareness test: From the literature review it was not clear if visually impaired people are aware of brands. To test this a simple survey was develop in which visually impaired respondents could indicate how many brands they knew per category. The amount of brands the respondents mentioned per category indicated to what extent visually impaired people are aware of brands. To conduct this test brand categories needed to be selected first.
Criteria brand categories: In this test a comparison is made between visually impaired (blind from birth, late blind and badly sighted) and sighted people. The criterion for the brand categories was that sighted and visually impaired people are both familiar with these brands.
Visually impaired and sighted people use computers in day-to-day situations, wear clothing/fashion brands, buy soda brands, and use cars for transport. The assumption was that it should not be difficult for visually impaired and sighted people to mention brands with the chosen brand categories.
Data collection: Participants were approached and requested to participate at a convention for visually impaired people in the centre of the Netherlands (Ziezo convention in the Dutch city Houten). First information about the respondent’s level of visual impairment was gathered and then the following script was used:
Researcher: “What (category) brands do you know?”
Respondent: Good response go on with the next brand category
Limited response researcher: “Even a brand name is enough.”
When respondents found it difficult to mention brand names top of mind the remark “even a name is enough” was made. Respondents sometimes found it hard to answer the first question and this remark assisted respondents with their response. Brands were rotated in the survey to minimize bias caused by the position of the brand categories in the survey. This means that the position of the brands in this survey changed to ensure that every brand was used as much first as last.
Results: The number of brands that respondents mentioned per category were combined and then divided by the number of categories (4) and are shown in figure 2. The original survey outcomes can be found in appendix 1.
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FIGURE 2: Brand awareness table
Number of brands mentioned (average over four categories) Groups Number of respondents 0 brands 1 brand 2 brands 3 brands 4 brands 5 brands
Blind from birth 15 4 3 2 4 1 1
Late blind 12 2 3 4 3 0 0
Badly sighted 11 0 3 3 2 3 0
An interesting outcome is that the variation in the amount of brand names is biggest for the blind from birth group. For the blind from birth group 47% knew zero or one brand per category whereas 40% knew three or more brands per category. There was less variation for the late blind group. Badly sighted respondents mentioned the most brand names per category.
Conclusions: These outcomes showed that visually impaired people are aware of brands but that variation exists between the research groups. To investigate if visually impaired people have brand personality associations open interviews were held. These open interviews are discussed in the following section.
Open interviews: The brand awareness test showed that visually impaired people are aware of brands. However, from the literature review it remained unclear if visually impaired have brand personality associations. To test this assumption open interviews were held to investigate if and what brand personality associations exist amongst the visually impaired groups.
Questionnaire and procedure: To gather more in-depth information about brand personality associations of the three visually impaired groups interviews were held with two respondents blind from birth, one late-blind respondent and one badly sighted respondent (appendix 2). In these interviews two main questions were posed to the respondents; what brands do you know?
And what associations do you have with these brands?
Results: Two main findings from the open interviews can be given. First, there is variation in the blind from birth group. One respondents found it difficult to mention brand associations whereas the other mentioned brand associations similar to sighted people. Second, all visually impaired respondents mentioned brand personality associations; cool, innovate and hip were
