University of Twente Student Theses
The impact of sustainability communication on consumers' brand associations in the food and beverage industry
Axelsson, S. (2023) The impact of sustainability communication on consumers' brand associations in the food and beverage industry.
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| Abstract: | With sustainability concerns receiving increasing attention in many fields, it is important to study how sustainability-related communication affects brand equity. This study investigates sustainability communication and its effect on the ways in which brand associations create value in the food and beverage industry. Aaker’s 1991 framework for brand equity is utilized as the basis of the framework used in this study. In order to find how brand associations, a facet of brand equity, are affected by sustainability communication, five hypotheses are developed on the basis of the five ways brand associations create value identified by Aaker. These five ways are: Processing and retrieving information, Differentiation and positioning, Reason-to-buy, Positive feeling and attitudes, and Brand extensions. The empirical part of this study is quantitative in nature. An experiment was conducted through the use of an online questionnaire, where respondents were randomly assigned an experimental condition. As the context of the empirical section is the coffee industry, respondents were shown communication examples from a coffee brand. Half were shown sustainability-related communication, and the rest non-sustainability related communication. The data was analyzed in the statistical software platform SPSS to assess the hypothesized causal relationships. The hypothesis testing led to results which were not statistically significant. The correlation analysis showed strong correlations between some ways in which brand associations create value and sustainability-related questions, providing avenues for further research. The results of the correlation analysis indicate that a brand’s level of perceived sustainability strongly positively correlates with three of the ways in which brand associations create value: Differentiation and positioning, Reason-to-buy, and Positive feelings and attitudes. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | Business Administration MSc (60644) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/94885 |
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