As the corporate competition and the importance of the uniqueness of each brand image became more excessive, it is important to discuss beyond the consumer's consumption pattern and discuss the management of the overall brand experience, from the purchase to the use of the product.
Brakus et al.(2009) describes that brand experience can be categorized into four characteristics: Sensory, Affective, Intellectual and Behavioral. They explain that these characteristics balance each other to create a complete brand experience and a foundation between the consumer and brand relationship. This means that the more brand experience one has, the more brand loyalty he or she would have. And this is reported to help consumers perceive the brand more emotionally.
Consumer's brand experience can be emotionally experienced depending on the consumer's autonomic nervous response or cognitively experienced depending on the social relations or reviews. It is reported that if consumers can have a more emotional or cognitive experience through brand experience, then consumers are likely to not only have an improvement of intellectual processes and willingness to process new experiences and criticism, but also continue relationships and build trust with others.
In this context, this study intends to explore how emotional and cognitive dimensions through the brand experience can influence the brand purchase intentions. Specifically, it would like to confirm the differential effects of sense and cognition on the intent of purchasing Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy phones through empirical analysis.
This study found that in the case of the Apple iPhone, the cognitive experience significantly influences purchase intention, while in the case of Samsung Galaxy phones, the sensory experience significantly affects purchase intention. That is, the senses and cognition influenced consumers' purchase intentions differently for each smartphone brand (Apple iPhone vs. Samsung Galaxy Phone). This can be interpreted as Apple iPhone buyers with a high average selling price (about $695) tend to have an information type that prioritizes cognitive experience, while Samsung Galaxy phone buyers with a low average selling price (about $185) are relatively non-informal.
The empirical results of this study provide some useful implications to create better marketing strategies for overall brand experience. First, the existing marketing programs are focused solely on increasing the consumers sensory stimulation like product demonstration, brand name, slogan and other design elements. Note that brand experiences may be reclassified in this study, based on whether it is an experience due to environmental sensory stimulation or a cognitive judgment after some interaction with a particular subject.
Second, to increase the purchase intention, this study suggests inducing sensory experience through sensory stimulation and cognitive experience through reason. This means a difficult decision making process like the purchase intention process can be positively influenced with simple sensory stimulations or other environmental factors of the store. This is what makes this study stand different from previous researches and it presents useful strategies when in an attempt to change the target consumer's behavior using experiences.
There are limitations to this study. First, this study examined the brands that actual consumers experienced through a purchase to understand the consumer's brand experience process. But because experience can occur in immediate responses, direct brand experience effect through offline demonstration or marketing stimulation should also be observed.
Second, this study chose smartphones to understand the overall brand experience. This choice was made with the consideration that brand experience must be examined in all areas including sensory and cognitive and it must be a relatively familiar product for the consumers. But it would be more significant if future researchers study the brand experience process in two tracks, practical products and luxury products.