Brand-image Marketing: Salient Benefits Sought by Fashion Consumers for Needs Fulfillment

Using the Critical Incident Technique, this paper examines the salient brand benefits sought by fashion (clothing) consumers. The result shows that there was a limited set of four or five items of these salient brand benefits. Stored in consumers' long-term memory, these brand benefits belonged predominantly to the functional or symbolic category. Moreover, both the functional and symbolic benefits appear to be essential rather than desirable to the fashion consumers when searching for brands to fulfill their conscious or latent needs. Implications for fashion marketers are also discussed.

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