The impact of advertising the use of customers’ opinions in product development on Continente’s brand equity

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyse the impacts that a new marketing strategy would have on Continente’s brand equity (specifically on brand loyalty, store loyalty and perceived quality). This new marketing strategy consists on advertising that Continente develops its products according to customers’ opinions, that were collected during the testing of the product and comes out as a tool to fight the ever growing competition in the retailing industry. Based on constructs that were investigated in previous research, the author’s survey was distributed in order to analyse the impact of this marketing strategy. After collecting the responses, the data was arranged and analysed in order to measure changes in (1) brand loyalty of Private Label Brand (PL) Continente, (2) store loyalty of Continente, (3) perceived quality of Continente labelled products and (4) perceived quality of Continente’s remaining PL. Besides shedding light on the fairly unexplored subject of PL’s brand equity, the author intends to help Sonae MC’s managers to take strategic decisions regarding Continente’s PL so that the retailer keeps dominating the Portuguese market. Results have shown that brand loyalty, store loyalty and perceived quality increase when consumers realize that their opinions are valued and used to develop Continente’s products. Hence, by involving consumers and advertising that involvement, Continente can not only improve the image of its PL but also its own image as a retailer.

Date of Award	19 Jul 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rute Xavier (Supervisor)