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An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.
Introduction
Understanding the nature of the mechanism through which a brand influences consumer decision making is a long-standing area of inquiry among marketing scholars and practitioners. Guided by an information economics perspective, consumers tend to be reluctant to make purchases when they are uncertain about product or service attributes. According to [20] Erdem et al. (2006), the uncertainty emerges from the condition of information asymmetry between firms and consumers (i.e. firms are more informed about their own products or services than are consumers). To solve this problem of consumer uncertainty, firms may use brands as signals to convey information about product or service quality to consumers effectively ([65] Spence, 1974; [17] Erdem and Swait, 1998, [58] Rao et al. , 1999). Given the potential utility of brands as signals, the credibility of a brand signal is the key contributor to brand choice within a market environment where consumer uncertainty occurs as it may improve consumer perceptions about brand attribute levels and may increase confidence in brand claims ([17] Erdem and Swait, 1998). In light of current knowledge, brand credibility can be defined as the perceived believability of whether a brand has the ability and willingness to continuously deliver what has been promised ([18] Erdem and Swait, 2004).
Although the importance of brand credibility has been given a considerable amount of attention in the marketing and consumer psychology literature, most previous research has been conducted with physical products rather than services. Despite the practical impetus and growing theoretical interest in brand credibility, relatively little is known about how brand credibility influences consumer purchase intention in the domain of services. According to [3] Berry (2000), a brand is especially important in service companies because a strong service brand increases consumers' trust about the invisible aspect of services and helps consumers better understand the intangible aspects of services. With the remarkable growth of service sectors in the US economy ([31] Krishnan and Harline, 2001), there is a pressing need to fill the gap in the literature regarding brand credibility effects focusing on services. Furthermore, there is not enough guidance to know whether or not service types and involvement really matter to...