A study on the impact of Italian olive oil brand image on attitudinal loyalty among middle- and high-income consumers in Beijing

In the context of the continuous deepening of the concept of healthy consumption, and the gradually matured high-end food market in China, as a very important part of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil also did not escape the attention of the market. Olive oil market attention closely related to the middle to high income group the market. However, with the increasing homogenization of products on the market and the use of asymmetric information, it is no longer enough to have "health attributes" or "Italian origin" to achieve an stable brand competitive advantage. Based on this, this study is focused on the middle to high income consumers in Beijing to systematically explore the influence mechanism of Italian olive oil brand image on attitudinal loyalty. The purpose is to determine the most important factors which can make the consumers to be loyal to a brand and can present some evidence about the brand to the businesses in order to decide the optimized brand in the Chinese market. Firstly, from the point of view of commodity science, the research puts the olive oil production process, the standards of quality and health aspects in a systematic review to clarify how the intrinsic logic of transforming the objective attributes of products into the functional and experiential images perceived by consumer. Based on this, in combination with the environment analysis of Chinese olive oil market, brand packaging content analysis and corporate interview, a multi-dimensional theoretical brand image framework, including product image, corporate image, country of origin image and service/channel image, is built. The data in the empirical section is collected using the questionnaire survey method, sampling middle to high-income consumers in Beijing that have experience in the consumption of Italian olive oil to collect the sample data, and the binary Logistic regression model is used to study the direct influence of each dimension of brand image on brand attitudinal loyalty. The results of this research show that brand image does play an important explanatory role for attitudinal loyalty of this consumer group, though the extent to which different dimensions play an important role differs significantly. Contrary to corporate expectations, contrary to the cultural symbolism associated with the country of origin, rational factors and service-oriented factors such as product quality stability, information transparency and uses are more important to consumers. It is a further finding of the study that there is a structural deviation-between the perception of corporate and the real decision making logic of the consumer. Theoretically, the result of this study deepens the empirical research on the relationship between brand image and loyalty in high-end health food industry. Practically, it provides some recommendations for the brand in the Italian olive oil market, to develop their market positioning, communication strategy and experience marketing pathways in the Chinese market.