Brand Credibility
A brand's standing for delivering what it claims, which lets the brand act as a signal of quality to buyers who cannot inspect it first.
What it is
Tülin Erdem, Joffre Swait and Ana Valenzuela tested the idea with consumers in seven countries in a study published in 2006. On this site it is read alongside Information Asymmetry, Uncertainty Avoidance and Individualism and Collectivism.
In effect
In that study the positive effect of brand credibility on choice was larger among consumers who scored high on collectivism or on uncertainty avoidance. Our reading for a brand in a city of many backgrounds is that credibility is built from consistency across the shop, the screen and the delivery; that is a practical inference, not a tested result.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as Information Asymmetry, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- Tülin Erdem is first author, with Joffre Swait and Ana Valenzuela, of Brands as Signals: A Cross-Country Validation Study, published in the Journal of Marketing in 2006.