Abstract
The economist has predicted that the consumption of goods and services in China has been steadily increasing every year (Paul Hubbard, Hurley, & Sharma, 2012) and therefore China has become an attractive market for both local and international businesses. Brands are playing an important part in the lives of Chinese consumers. The current study aims at bringing together the concept of brand salience and double jeopardy to understand the brand choices of consumers in China, specifically the choices and evaluations with respect to milk brands.
This research will mainly focus on brand salience and double jeopardy, in the background of consumer based brand equity. Brand salience and double jeopardy are really useful methods of analysing consumer market, especially by using them together. However, they have not drawn proper attention in the past few years. In short, the theory of brand salience helps us to explain which element of the brand attracts consumers to buy. Double jeopardy shows a not well-known but a true fact, which is a smaller/less popular brand has less-loyalty customers, compared to a bigger/more popular brand. These theories can help us look beyond the surface. By using them properly, both poor performing brands and miscategorised brands can be diagnosed. Therefore, this research area needs more research. The result of the research will benefit both academic and commercial domains.
The research methodology consists of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. This paper chose milk brands in China as the research object. The original reason for choosing this topic is that Chinese dairy safety still gets a lot of public attention in the world, even 6 years has passed after the melamine scandal. 7 individual interviews were done to get a broad view, followed by 270 surveys handed out in dozens of cities in China. The findings of the study revealed the existence of brand salience and double jeopardy in the category of milk in China. Suggestions are made for future research, and the managerial implications are discussed.