How Foreign Branding Affect Brand Personality And Purchase Intention?

Foreign branding as a product naming strategy is very popular. (Batra et. all 2000; Ling 2008). There is an emerging stream of research which empirically examines the effect of foreign branding on consumers? product evaluations and attitudes. (Li, Murray 2001). However how the foreign brand names effect brand personality is not studied. A brand personality is ?a set of human characteristics associated with a brand? (Aaker 1997). Favorable brand personality can enhance brand attitudes, consumer-brand relationships and purchase intentions (Freling, Crosno, Henard 2011). Therefore, studying the effect of foreign brand names on brand personality will contribute to the relevant literature. In this research we have made an attempt to analyze the effect of foreign brand naming on brand personality, attitudes and purchase intention. As a foreign brand name we have chosen English and English sounded words. The desire of consumers for westernization in developing countries (Stanlaw 1987) effected this decision. English, serving as the language of modernity, progress and globalization (Piller 2003) associates with a more urban, cosmopolitan, and upper class way of life and increases the prestige associated with a product (Friedrich 2002; Griffin, 1997; Haarmann 1989). Products with a foreign brand name will be evaluated as having a foreign country origin and improves the brands? desirability for symbolic, status and enhancing reasons in addition to suggesting overall quality for the developing country? consumers (Batra 2000) So we hypothesized that; use of English and English sounded brands will differentiate the perception of brand personality, will create more favorable attitude and increase product purchase intentions. We have chosen blue jean and café as products for analysis because of the prevalence of foreign brand names on both categories. Three group of participants were shown a blue jean image created by an advertisement agency for the purposes of this research but the brand names appeared on the blue jean image were different for each group as; Turkish, English and English sounded. Since the consumer may perceive brand personality differently depending on their culture (Lee, Kang 2013 ) we used the scale developed for Turkish consumers (Aksoy, Özsomer 2007) to measure brand personality. The same study is replicated for cafe. For the blue jean product significant differences were found between the Turkish and English/English sounded brands in terms of brand personality perception, attitudes and intention to purchase. For the café category use of local or English brand didn?t make difference on purchase intention.