Cognitive corporate association of consumers can be acted as strategic assets and competitive strength. The corporate association is closely related with purchase behavior and intention made by consumers. Therefore, marketers must understand the corpo...
Cognitive corporate association of consumers can be acted as strategic assets and competitive strength. The corporate association is closely related with purchase behavior and intention made by consumers. Therefore, marketers must understand the corporate association, the most important cue, to realize consumer's purchasing behavior.
That is, the more consumers possess favorable corporate association, the more they will respond positively. On the other hand, when consumers express unfavorable corporate association, they will respond negatively. With the perception about important corporate association, this research has tried to find effects between Corporate Ability Association and Corporate Social Responsibility Association researched by Brown and Dacin (1997). Compared to prior researches, the following are the differences: Since many studies have progressed about the corporate association, most studies focused on the products and brand. However there are only few studies that verified relationship between corporate association and service quality.
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the corporate association in medical service institution in the service quality awareness of consumer using SERVQUAL instrument. It has five generic dimensions or factors, "Tangibles" "Reliability", "Responsibility", "Assurance", "Empathy", and among them "Reliability" and "Empathy" were chosen for an effective research design. In addition, this study also empirically analyzes whether the perceived risk plays as a moderating role between the corporate association and the service quality awareness.
With the four-types of experimental research design (high-high, high-low, low-high, low-low CA and CSR association), a total of 420 self-administered questionnaires were gathered, among them 334 samples were statistically studied for the final analysis by SPSSWIN ver.18 and AMOS ver.18. The results were as follows.
First, this study proposes in terms of path analysis; thus, the corporate association (CA, CSR association) positively influenced on service quality awareness. Therefore, corporate CA association and CSR association positively influence on "reliability" and "empathy" dimension. In addition, "reliability" and "empathy" positively influenced on consumer intention to use for medical service. According to these results, it demonstrates that CA association and CSR association have a positive influence on service quality evaluation and consumer intention.
Second, in terms of the relative strength, corporate ability association was found to affect "reliability" more than "empathy". In addition, Corporate Social Responsibility association was found to affect "empathy" more than reliability".
Finally, the result of the moderating effect of perceived risk varied according to the level of the perceived risks. In the case of corporate ability association related to service quality awareness, it is found that perceived risk played as a moderating role on Reliability not on Empathy. The effect of CSR association on service quality awareness is not moderated by the perceived risk on Reliability. On the other hand it is not statistically significant on Empathy.
The present study contributes based on the Brown and Dacin's research, as most studies have focused on products and brand, this study investigates the influence of the corporation association on service quality awareness and empirically analyzes the moderating effect of perceived risks.