Inconsistencies in global brands and their affect on consumers' perceptions (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 110, , language: English, abstract: Recently, a lot of big corporations are pruning their portfolio just to be present with their big global brands. Even if it seems like managing global brands are easy, a lot of companies are facing with problems.

Many global brands are using different names, different logos or different positioning strategies around the globe. Especially in an increasingly global world, consumers' likelihood of noticing these differences have been dramatically increased. Suprisingly, so far the effects of these differences were ignored by both scholars and practitioners. This study strikes the first match about this topic.

Consumers' evaluation of the global brands' attributes, the perception of these differences and likelihood of purchase are investigated in the case of three conditions; global brands with different names, with different logos and with different positioning strategies.

In all conditions, consumers' evaluation about attributes of brands is changing. In line with previous literature, a high percentage of people perceive the differences as local adaptations. Lastly but most importantly, it is found that likelihood of purchase both in home country and in abroad is decreased in all the cases.