How People’s Consumption Experience Is Affected by

Advertisement Brands

Laurie（Zhong Shiqi)

Abstract
Consumers’ consumption experience is influenced by many factors, one of which is brand. Brand plays
an important role in today’s marketing. This paper probes into how people’s consumption experience is affected
by advertisement brands. The aim of this research is, through a deception experiment that whether let the
participants know the true coffee brands or not, to find out the influence of coffee brands on people’s drinking
experience. It is found that middle-aged people in China have shown a tendency in evaluating a drinking
experience largely depending on the coffee brands. The results have shown that there is a positive correlation
between brand value and consumer experience. High-status brands tend to make people feel good about the
product, while some less well-known or ordinary coffee brands are easier to have a negative impact. From this
study, it seems that brands do have the ability to change people’s minds to some extent.

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1.Introduction

Nowadays, with many advertisements in lives, people choose products largely depending
on the brand. Brand refers to the degree of consumers' recognition of products and is of great
importance of today’s market. For decades, one of the most popular topics is brand building. Why
is brand building important? Does it play a role in changing people’s mind? To examine the
impact of brand, I will design a specific study to try to answer these questions.
The idea that exposure to advertisement brands affects people’s mind has appeared early
and persists. Information Integration Theory proposed by Anderson(1981) shows that a person
integrates information from many sources in order to make a comprehensive judgment. Deighton
and Schindler(1988) show that exposing to advertising affects those who have experience with
the advertised claim’s topic. Levin and Gaeth(1988) found that the framing of advertisements
before affects the subjects deeply. Allison and Uhl’s (1964) study shows that consumers’
perceptions of beer differ depending on whether they know the brand of beer. These researchers
all searched about whether the advertisements will influence people’s product experience.
However, the influence of advertisement brands to people’s consumption experience has rarely
been examined directly. Therefore, it is of interest to analyze the relationship between the brand
value and consumer experiences. For this study, I take coffee as an example to search the
influence of brand on people's consumption experience.
Based on the natural observations in life and the results drew from Allison and Uhl’s
(1964) study, I develop the hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between brand value and
consumer experience. High-status brands tend to make people feel good about the product, while
some less well-known or ordinary coffee brands are easier to have a negative impact. In the
following, I begin section 2 by discussing the methods used to get my data. In section 3, I
elaborate the results of the study and discuss the special phenomenon appeared in the baseline
measure. In final section, I conclude the study, suggesting the scope of validity and future
improvement.

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2.Method

2.1 Experimental design

For the experiment, I designed two groups, group A and B, asking participants to rate three
different types of coffee based on a sample taste of the coffee. Each group contains five people.
Every participant in groups has three different brands of coffee which are of same type(latte) but
different qualities（Starbucks，K Coffee, Nestle）. Every cup of coffee has same quantity

(50ml) and a label showed the coffee brand.

For group A, the label of coffee brand is match with the coffee in the cup. Knowing the
true brand of coffee, participants taste each cup of the coffee then rank the taste of each coffee.
But for group B, the coffee brand is mislabeled. Without knowing the true brand of the coffee,
participants taste each cup of coffee then evaluates.
The experiment was conducted on two separate nights, each for half an hour. Participants
tasted three kinds of coffee then wrote down their ranks on the questionnaire. The rating scales
are from one to three, with one represents the best tasting and three the worst.

2.2 Brand choosing

There are several different kinds of coffee brands in today’s market. As the most famous
coffee brand in China, Starbucks constructs its brand successfully and its publicity is the best. It
locates clearly in the high-consumption group since founding in 1971. After entering the Chinese
market in 1999, Starbucks did not simply imitate the traditional overwhelming advertising but
used a unique communication strategy word-of-mouth marketing to promote the growth of target
customer groups. As a result, Starbucks gradually equated its brand image with high-status
customers in China, turning itself into a place for white-collar workers, business people to talk to,
or people who pursue life quality to consume, stimulating people's consumption.
Founded in China in 2014, K Coffee is a derivative brand under the big KFC brand. In
order to attract more young people, KFC has been seeking breakthroughs in entertainment
marketing. Through social media, celebrity fans, product customization, offline activities and
other perspectives, K coffee use various ways to boost its publicity. However, since it is not long
after its birth, its market share is not high until now.

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 Then it comes to Nestle. Founded earlier in China in 1988, Nestle is the leader in instant
coffee with great popularity. Since 1989, Nestle's first TV advertisement landed in China, "It
tastes great!" The classical advertising language is well known to all. After that, it continues to
innovate in terms of taste preferences of Chinese consumers. In 1998, Nestle instant coffee went
on the market, and then quickly won the favor of consumers in the high-status instant coffee
market. In 2014, Nestle issued the brand concept and brand-new logo of "It all starts with
NESCAFE" for the first time globally, which reflects the brand's determination to become
younger, more dynamic and keep pace with the times.
Since these three coffee brands cover three different brand grades from high quality coffee
to instant coffee, I chose these three brands of coffee as the coffee brand I used in my experiment.

2.3 Participants
Ten adults from China participated the experiment, including four men and six women.
Each group contains two men and three women. These participants are all middle-aged people
with financial ability. Some of them have the hobby of drinking coffee, some do not.

2.4 Baseline measure

In order to ensure the feasibility of the experiment, I designed questionnaires before the
experiment. I asked participants to rank these three coffee brands from one to three, with one
represents the best and three the worst.
After the participants finished ranking, I collected the results and found out whether they
have different opinions about the brand value of these three brands.

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3.Result and discussion

Table1-rank of Group A

Participants num. Starbucks K Coffee Nestle

\coffee brands

1 1-3 3-1 2-2

2 1-1 2-2 3-3

3 1-1 3-3 2-2

4 1-2 2-1 3-3

5 1-1 3-2 2-3

Table2-rank of Group B

Participants num. Starbucks(Nestle) K Coffee(Starbucks) Nestle(K Coffee)

\coffee brands

1 1-1 3-2 2-3

2 1-2 2-1 3-3

3 1-1 3-2 2-3

4 1-1 2-2 3-3

5 1-1 2-2 3-3

Table1 and 2 give the rate on each scale for different experimental condition of the present
study. In the tables, the first number represents the rate of the coffee brand and the second
number represents the rate of the taste. In table 2, coffee brands outside the bracket are
mislabeled, while inside are true brands of coffee.
Compared table1 to table2, I found that the brand showed by the label on the coffee cup
has a significant effect on people’s drinking experience. In table1, I found that most people’s
perceptions of coffee were basically matched with their rating score of the coffee brand. Many
people think Starbucks is the best and they give high evaluations to the drinking experience.
However, table2 shows that people’s evaluations are mismatched with the true brand of coffee.
Most of the participants still give high evaluations to the coffee which labeled Starbucks even the

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true quality coffee inside was not good(e.g.Nestle). At the same time, all the five participants
gave bad rating score to the coffee which labeled Nestle though the coffee inside was K Coffee.
Based on the above discussion, an argument could be made that brand affects people’s
drinking experience and there is a positive correlation between brand value and consumer
experience. People are likely to feel good having coffee of high-status brands and those less well-
known or low-status brands will make people have bad impressions about the drinking
experience. For example, in group B, without knowing the true brand of coffee, people made
evaluations largely depending on the fake brand showed on the label. While tasting the high
quality coffee like Starbucks, people still give bad rating score just because of the label “Nestle”
showed on the cup. My results are also consistent with those of Allison and Uhl(1964), who do
experiment about unidentified and then labeled bottles of beer and found that drinkers have
different perceptions of beer depending on whether they know the brand of beer or not. It showed
the rough measurements of the magnitude of the brands.
Moreover, from the two tables, a special phenomenon appeared in baseline measure. When
rating the three coffee brands, half of the participants chose the K coffee as the second coffee

grade，while the other half chose Nestle as the second grade. Conceptually, as a type of instant

coffee, the quality of Nestle is worse than the K Coffee. Thus, why did people have such different
evaluations? To answer this question, I surveyed the backgrounds of the two coffee brands and
made an analysis.
Nestle is undoubtedly the leader in instant coffee in China. Established early in China in
1988, it has great popularity and brand influence. According to Euromonitor International, Nestle
accounted for 72.3% of the instant coffee market in 2017. And Maxwell, the second largest
instant coffee brand, was only accounted for 3.1%. It means that most people in China choose
Nestle when having instant coffee.
The K Coffee, however, is not so popular. As a derivative brand under the KFC brand, K
Coffee founded in China late in 2014. Although it can quickly open up its popularity and market
relying on big brand KFC, its market share is not high now since it is not long after its birth.
Hence, compared with the Nestle, few people know about K Coffee in China. This may
explain why participants in the study have different opinions about the two coffee brands.

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4.Conclusion

In this paper, I have presented a deception experiment about coffee brands to search out
the influence advertisement brands have on the people’s consumption experience. I propose that
brands play an important role in changing people’s minds, influencing people deeply in their
product perceptions. Taking the coffee brands as an example, I examined how people were
affected by different status of coffee brands. The study showed that people’s consumption
experiences differ largely depending on the brands. High-status brands tend to have a positive
effect on people’s consumption experience, while some common brands cannot make people feel
good about the product.
This study suggests the big effect advertisement brands have on people’s mind. While it
helps people better understand the influence of brand, it also reminds companies to pay more
attention to the brand building. Like the LarryLight(2002）said: ‘the future of marketing is the

brand of war - the brand to compete in each competition. Business and investors will recognize
the brand is the company’s most valuable assets…The only way to have a market first, the brand
has a market advantage.’ Building a high-status brand will be beneficial to a product’s
development.
The hypothesis that I presented in this paper represents work in progress. There are still
many dimensions of this hypothesis need further data collection and experimental testing. The
results in this paper are only applied to middle-aged people in China, and many other people
remain to be investigated. What’s more, the extent to which people are influenced by the brands
is unclear. Further researches are needed in order to enhance people’s understanding about brand
effect and let people make better decisions in today’s market.

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 References

[1] Allison, R. I. & Kenneth P. U. (1964), Influence of Beer Brand Identification on Taste
Perception, Journal of Marketing Research, 37 (April), 36-39.

[2] Anderson, N. H. (1981). Foundations of Information Integration Theory, New York:

Academic Press.

[3] Deighton, J.,& Robert M. Schindler (1988), Can Advertising Influence Experience?
Psychology & Marketing, 5,103-115.

[4] Levin I. P. & Gaeth G. J.(1988), How Consumers are Affected by the Framing of Attribute
Information Before and After Consuming the Product, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol.
15, No. 3 (Dec., 1988), 374-378，Oxford University Press