Developing a Scale with Eco-friendliness as an Attribute of Brand Experience . 71

There are different complementary measurement scales used in research that have been used to monitor consumers’ relationships with various brand constructs, such as, for example, brand personality (Aaker, 1997), brand beliefs (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1990), brand attitudes (Barwise and Ehrenberg, 1987), as well as to measure consumers’

environmental concern, such as the NEP scale (Dunlap, 2008). Schultz and Zelezny (1999) refer to the environmental attitude measurement scale of Thompson and Barton (1994) that measures two value-based environmental concerns: eco-centric concern concentrates on the intrinsic values of the ecological world of plants and animals, while anthropocentric concern is concerned about what kind of effect environmental damage will have on the life quality of the human population. The degree to which people are sensitive to climate-change issues, are knowledgeable of clean energy and alternative energy options, as well as energy conservation can be considered to be explicit dimensions of environmental concern (Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2012).

There is also research on the influence of consumers’ concern for the environment to their consumption behaviors, and several studies confirm that the consumers’

environmental concern influences how they purchase eco-friendly products (Diamantopoulos et al., 2003, Teisl et al., 2008, Young et al., 2010, Akehurst et al., 2012, Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2012). In addition, the findings of Chen (2010) on green brand equity indicate that investing in activities that increase the green brand image, green satisfaction, and green trust would also improve the green brand equity of a company. The relationship of consumers with green brands has not been studied in depth (Papista and Krystallis, 2013). Papista and Krystallis (2013) have applied the customer value concept in association with green marketing to analyze what factors motivate or prevent the development of relationships between consumers and green brands, and they examined how consumers adopt green brands and how the consumers’

relationship with green brands develop, also taking into account situational and brand offering factors. The framework of Papista and Krystallis (2013) reveals the role of a brand’s performance as one type of economic value, where the link between eco-performance and functional eco-performance of a green brand helps managers to acquire information on the motives of consumers with regard to green brand choices. They looked at factors that show how the relationship between consumers and green brands

develop, however, the framework is rather complex and only conceptual and it does not use any quantitative data from consumers on their perceptions of various brands so that the results could be compared.

There is a gap in the research of measuring the eco-friendliness of consumers’ brand experiences. In the high-tech industry, companies do not currently have the means to track how their consumers experience their brand with regard to eco-friendliness, and they do not even know what kind of consumers consider this as one of the criteria or dimensions of the brand when they encounter, use or experience their brand. Still today, one of the top trends in the consumer markets is green consumerism, eco-friendliness and social responsibility, and this has already been responded to in the fast-moving consumer goods sector and white consumer electronics for households (McDonald et al., 2009) as well as in the automobile industry (Kim, 2011). And in the future, eco-friendliness could be one of the key selling points for consumer electronics and high-tech products in the case of some green consumer groups (Ottman, 2011). Also for the high-tech companies it is vital to maintain their reputation intact with regard to ESR requirements and activities (Diamantopoulos et al., 2003, Grimmer and Bingham, 2013).

There is a need to create more tools and scales for tracking consumers’ experiences on the friendliness of brands. So far there has been very little research in the way eco-friendliness could be included in brand measurement scales of consumer brand experiences. There are only a few researches that have included the dimension of social responsibility or eco-friendliness into their research on brands. (Madrigal and Boush, 2008), have studied social responsibility as a dimension of brand personality based on the brand personality scale and five dimensions of Aaker (1997), and have concluded that it is a unique brand personality dimension that can be conceptualized in terms of the brand’s obligation to society. The model also included a moderator of the Social Responsibility (SR) effect, the consumers’ willingness to reward the brand for its environmentally friendly actions and products, and they found as they had hypothesized, that the impact of SR was emphasized and the consumers’ willingness to reward company became higher. Madrigal and Boush (2008) interpreted this so that consumers are willing to reward a brand for its good deeds.

Sweetin et al. (2013) extended the research of Madrigal and Bousch (2008) and it was the first research on CSR that used the SR brand personality dimension created by Madrigal and Bousch (2008) and their research also partly replicated and extended the research on brand personality dimensions. According to Sweetin et al. (2013), consumers form psychological contracts with corporate brands they trust in, and if they somehow get the perception that they can no longer reach their personal targets in their identity projects with a certain brand, they are prepared to punish the company and the brand, and this is also valid in the case if a corporate brand turns out to be socially irresponsible.

The product area selected for this research is in the high-tech sector, because in the case of high-tech products eco-friendliness has not yet been used as a selling point to the consumers, even though most high-tech companies already have ESR related development and activities, but they have not been publicized to the consumers very actively yet. However, there is clearly still the trend of green consumption that is also impacting the high-tech markets with regard to, for example, energy efficiency of house appliances and consumer electronics (McDonald et al., 2009) .

Scale Development: Domain Specification and Item Generation for an Extended BBX Scale

The way experiences are dependent of the individual and situational factors (Holt, 1995, Fournier, 1998, Brakus et al., 2009, Schmitt, 2012) makes the development of an experience measurement scale a complex matter. Firstly, the context of any experience is usually complex and there are many possible variables that can be conditioned either individually or in different situations; secondly, experiences are non-linear so that a new factor in the experience may have a positive effect that can wear out when it is repeated several times; and finally, it is difficult to understand what is an optimal level for an experience and whether experiences are inherently positive or whether they should have a valence scale with positive-negative-neutral options (Skard et al., 2011). Situational factors include anything related to the selling point, its location, the facilities, even culture, economic climate and season, and individual consumer related factors include the type of goals the consumer has, socio-demographics, cultural background, earlier experiences, mood, personality traits as well as consumer attitudes (e.g. Lawson, 1997, Bettman et al., 1998, Rajala and Hantula, 2000, Yankelovich and Meer, 2006, Brakus et al., 2009, Hawkins and Mothersbaugh, 2010).

The first step in the process for creating better measures with marketing research is to define exactly what the measured construct is as well as the construct domain (Churchill, 1979). The concept of eco-friendliness in the context of brands has been understood here to be something that is not harmful to the environment (Merriam-Webster, 2015, OxfordDictionaries, 2015). When referring to sustainable consumption, the presumption is that the production and consumption habits are eco-friendly. People with sustainable or green consumption habits take into account ecological and ethical qualities of the consumer goods that they purchase and use (Stern, 2000), however, so-called pro-environmental behavior is not always necessarily motivated by environmental concern, consumers may also take action in order to save energy instead of being concerned for the environment for climate change, also saving energy seems to be mostly motivated by financial or health benefits more than due to being environmentally conscious (Whitmarsh and O'Neill, 2010). The eco-friendliness construct in this research can be considered to be both a conceptual ideal that portrays how a company wants the consumers to perceive their brand, i.e. representing a traditional brand management view (Keller, 2013), and an empirical presentation that

tries to capture how consumers actually perceive and experience the brand including its eco-friendliness, i.e. representing a more open view of a brand where brand producers and consumers together create a brand even on the physical and experience level (Pitt et al., 2006).

When formulating the items for the eco-friendliness construct, the aim was to investigate whether consumers also consider eco-friendliness in the context of general brand experiences. The four dimensions in the BBX scale were used as the basis for describing the eco-friendliness construct as they have already been proven to be in the general BBX scale and to represent the brand experiences of consumers. In this study, it was tested whether these dimensions can also be applied in the eco-friendliness construct in association with brand experiences. The four brand experience dimensions in the BBX scale are distinct ways how consumers experience brands. And accordingly, also eco-friendliness is broken in this research into consumer traits on the affective, behavioral, intellectual and sensory levels. The items for the eco-friendliness construct were formulated on the basis of the following thinking presented below.

1) The sensory level is an important aspect in the context of eco-friendliness, i.e.

consumers can have experiences, for example, in which the physical appearance of brand-related stimuli have given an impression on the eco-friendliness of the brand.

Schmitt’s model of brands (2012) in the field of consumer psychology takes into account that brand-related information is handled by various senses, (i.e. through multi-sensory stimulation). It is also considered to be critical how consumers view, hear and like the touch of products (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). The sensory dimension is also critical with respect to especially green products as the look and feel of eco-friendly products very often differs from the competing mainstream products as they have been made from materials that are different, such as low impact or recycled materials; also the use of material is reduced to minimum according to the eco-design strategies that take into account the impacts of the product during its full life cycle (Vallet et al., 2013).

2) The affective level is a very critical element to consider in the overall experience of eco-friendliness as there are emotions involved in the consumption situations (Richins, 1997) as well as experiences of products (Holt, 1995). Consumers also have very personal and subjective internal responses to brand-related stimuli that raise sensations and feelings (Fournier, 1998). In association with green energy advertisements it has been shown that consumers can get feelings of warm glow as a result of the self-satisfaction that they feel when they support a common good cause for the environment (Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2012).

3) The behavioral level in the context of eco-friendliness refers to how the consumers consider the brand to support or boost their eco-friendly behavior. When consumers are in contact with brand-related stimuli the responses can also have an impact on

their behavior (Fournier, 1998). If a brand helps consumers in their personal identity-building projects (Keller, 1993, Aaker et al., 1995, Stokburger-Sauer et al., 2012) and allows them to behave in an eco-friendly way and to also show that they belong to a certain lifestyle group that is ecologically conscious, it is a crucial feature of a brand when considering the eco-friendliness of a brand experience (Yankelovich and Meer, 2006).

4) On the intellectual level consumers may think about the state of the environment when they encounter a brand. Traditionally in marketing, consumers have been considered to be rational decision makers, however, as marketing research has evolved it has been also understood that there are in addition other characteristics, such as emotions or personal goals that have an impact in the consumers’ decision making process (Lawson, 1997, Bettman et al., 1998, Foxall, 2007). Still, the cognitive considerations of a consumer have an effect on their behavior, even though emotions may also have an impact (Punj and Stewart, 1983). With the online environment consumers have learnt to search for information and they are interested in product attributes or the opinions of other users before a purchase (Peterson and Merino, 2003). When consumers need to make major purchase decisions concerning larger technical devices, such as automobiles or household appliances, as well as smaller consumer electronics that have a larger environmental impact than other purchase decisions, some consumers also consider product or brand related information, for example: the environmental performance of the product, (e.g. energy efficiency, durability), product manufacturing (recycled materials, chemical content and repairability), and possibly second-hand availability of the branded products (Young et al., 2010).

All of these four aspects together form a comprehensive eco-friendly dimension that brings together all the aspects in which a consumer experiences brands and products.

The further development of the BBX model started by the creation of the additional items of friendliness in the scale. In the purification phase of the scale, the eco-friendliness items in the measurement scale were formulated with reference to the existing four dimensions in the BBX scale to enable the verification whether the eco-friendly attribute is actually something that the consumers associate already with the existing four brand experience dimensions, or whether it is a fifth dimension in the BBX measurement scale. The wordings of the items for the questionnaire were formulated following the logic of the original BBX model in the following way:

• Sensory: This brand makes an eco-friendly impression. (eco-friendly = not environmentally harmful)

• Affective: This brand creates eco-friendly emotions

• Behavioral: This brand makes me behave in an eco-friendly way

• Intellectual: This brand makes me think about the state of the environment

The four items on eco-friendliness were included in two extended conceptual BBX models developed from the original BBX model in this study: one had the items on friendliness included in the original four dimensions so that one corresponding eco-friendliness item was added in each of the dimensions. And in the second extended model, the items on friendliness formed together a separate dimension of eco-friendliness. The questionnaire was pretested in order to verify that all of the items were understandable. A seven point Likert scale with an eighth option for “Do not know” was used. The questionnaire was distributed by the internet to the respondents and they were allowed time to respond to it in privacy, so the results are expected to be very honest and they depict the respondents’ true view on the eco-friendliness of the mobile phone brands included in the survey. The more detailed findings of the survey and research will be described below in the next chapter.

3 RESEARCH METHOD AND DATA

This chapter describes the research design including details on the sampling, data collection as well as analysis methods. In addition, the measurement related topics on item selection for the questionnaire as well as the validation of the measurement model are covered.