This presentation describes the results of basic research regarding the relation between sustainability and brands in general and the relevance of sustainability for brand equity in particular. The understanding of social comparison processes and the method of conceptualising and measuring attitudes by applying the models of Fishbein and Ajzen, lead to basic findings about the importance of the perception and evaluation of sustainability in the social environment of customers. The psychological impact of a brand, and thereby the impact of sustainability on the purchasing decision, is the basis whereby one calculates the Brand Equity by using a certain formula and so to sustainability as a monetary brand value.
This paper provides a psychological and economic analysis of the development of ecology in a free market as observed in Germany in the last decade. The problems involved in simply defining what ecology means and the resulting question of how to measure corresponding market shares are discussed. The analysis continues with recent findings about the purchasing process of products with special ecological quantities addressing the special meaning of social influence on decisions in that area. Further this paper offers a summary of the most important findings for planning in countries and companies which must face the question of how to make the beauty of nature and the nature of their business a happy couple again.
The so called Image and the relevance for buying behaviour imputed to it gains importance for planning of marketing communications - talking about brand- and corprorate images. This inclination is confronted by a lack of theoretical and conceptional development of the definition of image, of image-models and the factual importance of image for the purchase-process. Firstly the paper discusses the mostly ignored epistemological background, the defintion of terms and the history of image research. This discussion is followed by a summary of the most popular image-models. The reanalysis of this field of research leads to the conclusion: The central idea of the most popular image-models is that the distance between an ideal image-object (that might be hypothetical) and the real image-object(s) determines the preference of die object(s). These models (that are used daily in the world of market research) have their base in the social-psychological attitude- behaviour-research, but do not consider the results of this field consequently. The next part of the paper is therefore a review of relevant findings in the contemporary attitude-behaviour-research. These findings support the central hypothesis of this paper: The rarely doubted distance-premise is not valid at all in the assumed way because a) the attitude-behaviour-consistency basically is systematically determined by social influence and b) by variables in the personality, such as knowledge about the object, status, behavioral control and self-confidence. Data is also presented to provide evidence for the resulting hypotheses that the distance-premise is only valid for objects with the same "starting-position" and the starting-position can be measured by the perceived social importance of the image- object. Image is more that which "the others" seem to think than, an individual structure of expectation. You might just call it perceived importance or - power. In the context of marketing this fact might have a lot to do with the "longer and broader effects of advertising". The paper closes with notes about the meaning of the findings presented for marketing and future image-research.
The first and central part of this work introduces the history of attitude-behaviour research, focusing upon the endeavour to conceptualize the relation between attitudes and behaviour. Without going too deeply into the particulars of the different methods of attitude-measurement reviewed quite often elsewhere, this paper will contribute to the basic understanding of the relation between attitudes and overt behaviour, which is important for the social sciences as well as for contemporary marketing. Reviewing this history of research leads to the conclusion that in the behaviour- intention model by Fishbein & Ajzen the concepmalization (through the model components "attitude toward the behaviour to the object", "percepted social norms", and "intention") of the attitude-behaviour relation is accomplished in the most adequate way. In order to prove the high relevance of social influence upon attitude-behaviour-consistency, empirical findings will be presented. An applied example from psychological marketing research will then be used to show how knowledge about the influence of social norms on purchasing can be transferred for practicle use. After a detailed explanation of the behaviour-intention model, which belongs to the multi-attributive models, the importance of a further analysis of the relation between social influence, personal attitude, and the intention, will be made clear through a comparison of this model with classificatory attitude-behaviour models. In the second part of this paper, the statements about conceptualization of the attitude-behaviour relation will be completed with a summary of other variables which are relevant for the attitude-behaviour consistency (such as qualities of the situation, attitude, and behaviour). After having pointed to the importance of precise knowledge about the attitude- behaviour relation for marketing (especially for the measurement of purchase intention, product positioning, and psychological market segmentation) some propositions will be made as to how the findings of the attitude-behaviour research can be applied to solve the question of "How ?" for the evaluation of advertising vs. promotion.