The research selects three green brands in food & restaurant service industry as the sample brands among ten classifications: MOS Burger, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. The interviews for this study were conducted in private offices where participants could talk without interruption. All of the interviews were audio-taped with the participants’ permission, and later transcribed to provide accurate records for analysis. Standard procedures were followed to maintain the confidentiality of the interview data and the anonymity of the participants. Participants took an average of 10 photos and interviews totalled 36 hours and 26 minutes, with the longest interview taking almost 150 minutes and the shortest 53 minutes; average time was 91 minutes.
For the thought to be considered an element, it must be mentioned by more than one-third of the participants. There were 24 participants in this study, an elements of brand positioning included was mentioned by at least 8 participants. The results reveal 74 positioning elements perceived for three green brands, listed in Table 5.
Table 5 shows that the number under each green brand indicated the total number of the participants mentioned toward specific elements. Among the three green brands, MOS BURGER had a total of 42 different brand positioning elements elicited, followed by Starbucks (n=38), and McDonald’s (n=27).
Brand positioning elements that most participants mentioned for MOS BURGER were
“environment-friendly (n=24)”, followed by “savings (n=21)”, “reuse (n=19)”, “vegetables (n=17)”, and “reusable shopping bags (n=20)”. For Starbucks, the mostly mentioned brand positioning elements were its “environment-friendly (n=24)”, “reusable tumblers (n=22)”, “paper products (n=21)”, “savings (n=21)”, and “reuse (n=20)”. In MacDonald’s, the “paper products (n=24)”,
“recycling (n=24)”, and “environment-friendly (n=24)” were particularly mentioned by all participants, followed by “savings (n=21)”, and “garbage sorting (n=19)”. There were two elements that were simultaneously mentioned by most participants across three brands, namely
“environment-friendly (n=24 for three brands)” and “savings (n=21 for three brands)”. Figure 7
uncovers an aggregate consensus map for three brands, consisting of 74 elements in total.
Table 5: Association elements of three green brands
McDonald's MOS BURGER Starbucks
Logo 0 0 12
Hand washing 0 11 0
Figure 7: The consensus map of three green brands
5. Conclusion
5.1 Contribution
This study provides meaningful and applicable implications for green branding practices.
There are two aspects of pragmatic implications as follows.
First, as society’s concern about environmental deterioration has increased, more companies are willing to accept the environmental responsibility. In line with this trend, the past decade has also witnessed an increase of commercial and organizational research attention related to sustainability and green initiatives. With the environmental resources being scarce and deteriorated globally, there is a great value to keep on conducting researches around this issue. The contribution of the study will not be limited to the academic research. The whole society, including the enterprises, will be also benefited with the findings of research.
Second, the study presents a new methodological tool for brand analysis. The technique of ZMET generates detailed green brand positioning information and closely mirrors consumer’s perceptions toward the green brands. It also has room for branding effect, such as brand parity and brand dilution. These effects can be further analyzed through several measures of network analysis, such as examining structural equivalence and the density of individual brand association networks.
All of these analyses can identify pivotal green brand associations, and critical relations that will advantageous for brand management.
5.2 Limitations
There are a few limitations that need to be considered when interpreting and applying the study’s results.
Fist, the findings may not hold valid across different industries of green brands. In this study, only the green brands in food & restaurant service industry that are familiar to the subjects are chosen. Thus the brand associations critical in this study probably will not still be important in the other green brands. In addition, familiarity has been recognized as one of the most important factors in raising high brand equity (Keller, 1993; Keller & Lehmann, 2006; Krishnan, 1996). Considering
the subjects in this study having a relative high familiarity with the green brands chosen in this study, it is not surprising that these green brands have the higher brand equity than the ones outside the study. The result may be different if the same study is repeated on the context of different countries as consumer familiarity with the green brands can change quite differently.
All the limitations do not deteriorate the contributions of the study, but emphasize that marketing research shall be specific to the target market instead. Although no general rules are applicable across every single market segment, it is more valuable to find an effective tool of marketing research to better achieve goals of marketing management. This is exactly the value of this study that the study can provide such a tool and benefit green branding research.
5.3 Conclusion
The trend of the society’s environmental concern offers global companies a branding opportunity to achieve competitive advantage. Nevertheless, although the importance of branding in corporate competitive advantages has been recognized by Taiwanese government, practitioners, and academic researchers, little knowledge is known about green branding, especially positioning from the perspectives of consumers. The lack of the grounded knowledge about Taiwanese consumer perceptions toward green brand positioning leaves less opportunity for Taiwanese firms to gain competitive advantage through CSR with environmental awareness. This brings more stiff challenges for Taiwanese firms in building international brands. In the current research, the knowledge grounded in Taiwanese consumer perceptions were developed and refined via ZMET approach. The results contribute to drawing significant implications for Taiwanese enterprises in developing green branding and shifting to international branding, especially offering local brand managers empirically-based insights for making related decisions about green positioning.
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BAI 2013 International Conference on Business and Information Academy of Taiwan Information Systems Research (ATISR) International Business Academics Consortium (IBAC)
Marketing, Business Administration, Business Policy and Strategy, Management Information System, Operations Management, Social Issues in Management, Web Technology and Management
(10:30-12:00) Marketing
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