Consumer-level factors that moderate the success of private label brands: Hedonic versus utilitarian products

Private labels with increasing market shares and improving quality perceptions are a worldwide phenomenon receiving attention from both academicians and professionals. Taking the consumer perspective, this study with its large-scale survey examines the predictive power of consumer-level factors such as price consciousness, price quality associations, brand loyalty and quality variability on private label brand purchase intentions with multiple regression analyses. The unique contribution of this paper is analyzing private label purchase decisions by comparing hedonic products to utilitarian products. As a result, we see consumers exhibit different behaviors toward them. Results showed that consumers are more prone to buy PLBs when it is an utilitarian good and perceive less quality variability among different brands of the utilitarian good. On the other hand, people are more brand-loyal for hedonic goods and make higher price quality associations compared to utilitarian goods. The Regulatory Focus Theory, people's dominant regulatory focus, is also integrated into the model, but consumers' dominant regulatory focus did not exhibit any significant predictive power on private label purchase intention according to the regression analysis. Demographics such as age, education, income level and household size are other independent variables in the regression analysis, and some of them proved to be significant for one of the two product types.