THE IMPORTANCE OF BRAND AWARENESS IN CONSUMERS’ BUYING DECISION AND PERCEIVED RISK ASSESSMENT

Brand awareness, as one of the fundamental dimensions of brand equity, is often considered to be a prerequisite of consumers’ buying decision, as it represents the main factor for including a brand in the consideration set. Brand awareness can also influence consumers’ perceived risk assessment and their confidence in the purchase decision, due to familiarity with the brand and its characteristics. On the other hand, brand awareness can be depicted into at least two facets – unaided (brand recall) and aided (brand recognition) – each of the two facets having its more or less effective influence on buying decision and perceived risk assessment. This paper tries to reveal, on one hand, the importance of unaided brand awareness when it comes to consumers’ buying decision and, on the other hand, the importance of aided brand awareness when assessing the perceived risk associated with the purchase. The analysis is conducted in a comparative manner, considering the case of durable versus non-durable products, and with focus on urban Romanian consumers.brand aided and unaided awareness, brand choice, perceived risk

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE DIMENSIONS OF BRAND LOYALTY. AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION AMONG ROMANIAN URBAN CONSUMERS

Considering the increasing importance of brand loyalty in the context of fierce competition, the paper aimed at empirically investigating, among urban Romanian consumers, the relationship between some of the major dimensions of brand loyalty. Measurement was conducted through five indicators: brand satisfaction, brand repurchase intention in similar buying contexts, brand recommend intention, brand repurchase intention in case of price increase (price elasticity of loyalty) and, respectively, repurchase intention in case of distribution decrease (distribution elasticity of loyalty). The main objective of the research was not only to investigate the relationship between the dimensions of brand loyalty as reflected by the five previous loyalty indicators, but also to suggest a conceptual model of brand loyalty considering the nature and intensity of the identified correlations. The data was collected through an ad-hoc questionnaire based survey, sampling the population by means of a mixture of classical probabilistic and non-probabilistic methods. The results proved positive correlations among loyalty dimensions and allowed us to propose a general model for the relationship between these dimensions.behavioral intend, brand loyalty, extended loyalty, loyalty essence.

Universality and quantum criticality of the one-dimensional spinor Bose gas

We investigate the universal thermodynamics of the two-component one-dimensional Bose gas with contact interactions in the vicinity of the quantum critical point separating the vacuum and the ferromagnetic liquid regime. We find that the quantum critical region belongs to the universality class of the spin-degenerate impenetrable particle gas which, surprisingly, is very different from the single-component case and identify its boundaries with the peaks of the specific heat. In addition, we show that the compressibility Wilson ratio, which quantifies the relative strength of thermal and quantum fluctuations, serves as a good discriminator of the quantum regimes near the quantum critical point. Remarkably, in the Tonks-Girardeau regime the universal contact develops a pronounced minimum, reflected in a counterintuitive narrowing of the momentum distribution as we increase the temperature. This momentum reconstruction, also present at low and intermediate momenta, signals the transition from the ferromagnetic to the spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid phase and can be detected in current experiments with ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices.Comment: 5+2 pages, RevTeX 4.