Eco-friendliness in the brand experience of high-tech products

Abstract: The focus in this research is to develop a brand measurement scale for measuring how consumers experience eco-friendliness when reflecting on global high-tech brands. The aim is to examine can the eco-friendliness dimension in the brand experience of a high- tech brand be measured with a brand experience measurement scale by extending the research of Brakus et al. (2009). This research topic was selected because also high-tech companies are facing the need to analyze how consumers view the eco-friendliness of their brands in order to create greener products that could also benefit the financial performance of the company (Siegel, 2009). Eco-friendliness can be seen as an important factor for consumers when they are purchasing e.g. fast-moving consumer goods (McDonald et al., 2009) and automobiles (Kim, 2011). However, it is not still considered to be so relevant when buying consumer electronics or high-tech products and this is an area that has not been researched as extensively (McDonald et al., 2009). This dissertation focuses on this research gap and investigates how eco-friendliness can be measured in the brand experience of high-tech products.The approach in this dissertation is empirical and the research has been conducted as a replication and extension of the existing brand experience measurement scale (BBX scale) developed earlier by Brakus et al. (2009). The BBX scale was developed further and extended with a fifth dimension for eco-friendliness to get a better understanding of the concept of eco-friendliness in the brand experience. In the design of the study, the eco-friendliness dimension was created on the basis of the attested dimensions in the BBX model, including affective, behavioral, intellectual and sensory dimensions. The theoretical background of this dissertation is based in management of high-tech innovations and especially consumer behavior and brand management research in this domain. The research includes empirical data collected in a web survey in Finland that was analyzed by using the original BBX model and two different models portraying extensions of the BBX model that also included items on eco-friendliness.The contribution of this study is that theoretically brand experience was proved to have also an eco-friendliness dimension in addition to the affective, behavioral, intellectual and sensory dimensions included in the original BBX scale. This study succeeded in modelling the general brand experience of mobile phones based on the original BBX model and it was also confirmed that eco-friendliness is an additional, uniquely identifiable fifth dimension in the brand experience of high-tech brands. The implication of this finding is that high-tech companies should also take into account eco-friendliness that has become increasingly important in the management of corporate value and brands in the global competition (Mohr et al., 2010, Keller, 2013) in order to respond to the needs of green consumers (Chatterjee et al., 2010, Aaker, 2011, Kotler, 2011, Ottman, 2011, Accenture and UN_Global_Compact, 2014).