Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
How do consumers experience store brands in emerging markets? Does previous experience with store brands affect consumer purchase intention in these countries? Do other variables, such as the cultural context, intervene in the process through which consumer experience with store brands leads to purchase intention within the Latin American context?
Store brands, otherwise known as private labels or retailer brands, refer to products that belong to a retail chain, carry the chain’s name and are offered exclusively in the retail chain’s outlets, in contrast to national brands. Several useful constructs have been investigated in the retail branding literature and applied to emerging countries, including store brand price perceptions (Diallo, 2012), store brand attitude (Jin and Suh, 2005), store brand proneness (Sheau-Fen et al., 2012), store brand perceived value (Kara et al., 2009), among others. However, store brand experiences have been scarcely investigated in the context of emerging countries, and especially in Latin America which is one of the least investigated regions in international marketing research (Fastoso and Whitelock, 2011). Nevertheless, in general, brand experience has attracted greater attention in marketing practice as marketing practitioners have come to realise that understanding how consumers experience brands is critical for the development of marketing strategies for goods and services (Brakus et al., 2009). In addition, previous research has studied contexts in which specific brand product and service experiences arise (Arnould et al., 2002). However, prior studies have largely ignored the retail sector where branding is becoming critical (Burt and Davies, 2010). For instance, with its extra brand ranges, British retailer Tesco utilises store brands in both developed and emerging markets to provide customers new options to enhance their shopping experience. Furthermore, retail companies offer store brands in several emerging countries, but with different cultural contexts. According to Kantar WorldPanel (2014, p. 3), “in the near future we should expect brands from emerging markets to expand into other fast-growing economies: we already see Korean cosmetic brands selling their products in Latin America and Africa and Russian dairy brands entering Asian market”. However, neither previous nor existing studies do yet provide an understanding of how cultural contexts affect the relationship between consumer experiences with brands and purchase behaviour. For instance, although Brazil and Colombia...