| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 企業管理研究所 === 96 === Since the establishment of the EU, the importance of the European market to Taiwan has been steadily increasing. Among Taiwan’s major trading countries (areas), the European market has the highest export growth rate, with the highest volume of trade happening between Germany and Taiwan. Despite this fact, researches about German or European consumers are still rare in the domestic academia, where the focus is mostly on China, USA, and Japan. There are some reasons causing this. First, Europe’s economic status of was lower than the previously mentioned countries. Also, there were fewer scholars from Europe, which may lead to higher research costs and difficulty in collecting data among others. Nevertheless, with the increasing number of exchange students going to Europe, this would offer domestic academia and businesses an opportunity to better understand European consumers.
This research starts with an examination of previous culture-related literatures to discover the differences in all cultural dimensions between Taiwan and Germany. From this, the research infers that there would also be differences in brand personality, advertising appeals, and consumer value-beliefs. Moreover, the research discussed the relationship between brand preferences and brand personality/advertising appeals/consumer value-beliefs. Two well-known brands were selected, Mercedes-Benz and Acer, and questionnaires for each brand were developed and distributed randomly in Taiwan and Germany. Four hundred ninety five valid questionnaires were collected, among which 247 were collected in Taiwan and 248 were in Germany.
The results revealed that there were significant differences in one brand’s brand personality and advertising appeals. Furthermore, consumers had more positive attitudes toward their home country’s brand. The research also found that consumer value beliefs affected by the culture were different between Taiwan and Germany in “Brand Favor,” “Conformance Orientation,” “Face Influence,” “Hedonic,” “Frugality Intention,” and “Security Needs.” In addition, it was proved that brand personality was significantly related to consumers’ brand preferences. However, advertising appeals and consumer value-belief had relatively lower influence on the brand preferences.
Businesses could utilize the results of this study to devise marketing initiatives depending on consumer value-beliefs, such as Taiwan’s “Conformity-orientation,” “Frugality intention,” “Security Needs,” and “Price Sensitivity” and Germany’s “Hedonic,” “Price Sensitivity,” and “Frugality Intention.” Moreover, businesses could also build favorable brand personality to influence brand preferences. As for the academia, this research not only broadens the understanding of the European market, it also finds the relationship influence between brand personality, advertising appeals, consumer value-beliefs, and brand preferences, especially that in which brand personality significantly influences brand preference, which could be the base of further investigation.
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