The Effect of Perceived Autonomy on Young Chinese Customers Perception of Coolness

Abstract

Customers value coolness and to attract those target customers, marketing practitioners are trying to build a cool image for their brand and products through various channels. Despite lots of work have been conducted on coolness, little has been done on clarifying what makes things cool and its underlying mechanism. Warren & Campbell(2014) first explored the empirical relationship between autonomy and perceived coolness in Western culture and demonstrated that autonomy is a significant predictor of customers perceived coolness. To investigating whether the relationship between autonomy and perceived coolness will still be effective in Eastern culture, which is one of the main concerns of Warren & Campbells research, this current research first replicated the work of Warren & Campbell on young Chinese customers. More importantly, this research has conducted two experiments to reveal the mediating role of admiration and moderaing role of individuals risk-taking attitude during the effect of autonomy on customers perceived coolness.

Autonomy of a fictitious brand (Study 1) and a theoretical person (Study 2) were manipulated. Both two studies first tested the prediction of higher autonomy leads to greater percieved coolness and the prediction was supported in both studies. The results also demonstrated the mediating role of admiration (Study 1,2) and moderating role of individuals risk-taking attitude (Study 2). Notably, differed from expectation, individuals risk-taking attitude showed a significant moderaing effect only when manipulaing the autonomy level of a theretical person (Study 2) but not a fictitous brand (Study 1). This conversed result was discussed in general discussion part.

The current research significantly contributes to the extant litearute on coolness by replicating the finding that autonomy leads to perceived coolness in Chinese customers, those who are affected by Eastern culture. Moreover this study further propose a research model to explain the effect of autonomy on coolness, which suggests some implicaion for marketers and researchers. Limitaions and future research ideas are also discussed at the last part.