Brand Familiarity Analysis

The brand has been shaped over the years such as a differentiating core component of a product, service or company among its competitors with its corresponding design, structure, management, and marketing for stakeholders (Aaker, 1991; Heding, Knudtzen, and Bjerre, 2009). According to the American Marketing Association (AMA, 2017), the brand is “customer experience represented by…name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers”. The power of a brand must not only be assumed to be an enduring intangible asset and a uniqueness symbol of the product but also because of its ability to generate consumers’ reputation, acceptance, preference, credibility, and familiarity

Product-related experiences involve advertising exposures, information search, interactions with salespersons, choice and decision-making. These authors also suggested that familiarity is linked to the sum of consumer’s knowledge, experiences and the acquisition of information about specific products, helping to decrease cognitive effort in a consumer decision. Consequently, brand familiarity is a basic expression of consumer’s knowledge connected to his memory structures and associations about the brand (Baker et al., 1986; Campbell and Keller, 2003). Hence, brand familiarity might be defined as the extent in which consumer accrues brand-related experiences in two ways, directly through the product trial, usage, and consumption, and indirectly by information search, advertising exposure, choice and decision-making (Baker et al., 1986; Alba and Hutchinson, 1987; Kent and Allen,

Its moderating role may have some causes, for instance, major attention to familiar brands, connection with the advertising of familiar brand derived from previous experience, and positive acceptance of advertising (Tellis, 1997). Several notable articles published in advertising area have examined the moderate role of brand familiarity. By way of illustration, Biswas (1992) found that brand familiarity has a positive influence on purchase intention, especially when a highly familiar brand is exposed and implausible reference price is presented. While Kent and Allen (1994) study revealed that both familiar and non-familiar brands generated fewer memories of advertising statements, thus, brand familiarity moderated the relationship between competitive interference and consumer memory for advertising. Surprisingly, to the author’s knowledge, no previous studies have discussed the moderating effect of brand familiarity between green consumerism and skepticism toward green advertising. Hence, there is a critical need to explore this effect