Impact of Brand Equity, Advertisement and Hedonic Consumption Tendencies on Cognitive Dissonance: A Mediation Study

Abstract

Current study puts light on the role of brand equity, hedonic consumption tendencies, and advertisement on cognitive dissonance. Impulse Buying plays the role of a mediator in the study. Purpose of this study is to examine how brand equity, hedonic consumptions, and advertisement affect cognitive dissonance of the customers. Analyses of a sample of 370 customers, drawn from different outlets of famous fashion clothes in Multan city, revealed attention-grabbing findings. A mediation analysis was conducted through regression analysis in the study. Hedonic consumption tendencies and advertisement were found significant in predicting cognitive dissonance while brand equity was found having an insignificant relation with cognitive dissonance where impulse buying found significant in predicting cognitive dissonance being having positive relation. Further to this, impact of brand equity, advertisement and hedonic consumption tendencies found directly related to impulse purchase. Product category wise examination of current model adds new directions and findings in the future. Prior studies on purchase intentions have mainly focused on simple models at any given time. However, researchers increasingly argue that a complex representation may give better understanding of customers’ purchase intentions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first empirical studies to address a complex structure of the proposed variables.