Consumers Willingness to Pay More for Character Licensed Merchandise

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential mediating effect of perceived consumer value in the relationship between the consumer intimacy with a character (character familiarity, character self-congruity, and character identification) and willingness to pay more for a character-licensed merchandise. Direct effect, partially mediated, and fully mediated models were compared. Online convenience survey was conducted and totally 582 participants in China did the investigation. In the survey, two T-shirts, one with an officially licensed character (such as Spider-man), the other with the same color and style but without character, were designed to measure consumers willingness to pay for a character in the context of T-shirt. To generalize the results, more than one character (Spider-man, Abe no Seimei, and Pikachu) was chosen based on the familiarity score in the first pretest. In the main study, contingent valuation method (CVM) with open- end questions was used to measure consumers WTPM for a character-licensed T-shirt. At the beginning of the survey, Participants were asked to offer their highest price for buying an ordinary T-shirt (no character) , and then after giving their scores on character familiarity, they were asked to offer their highest price again for buying a character T-shirt. In the remaining part, participants were required to answer self-congruity, identification and consumer value related questions.

According to the results of the study, price premium for a character indeed exists. And most of the participants (86.3%) were willing to pay for a character-licensed T-shirt less than twice price of that without a character. Moreover, the results of model testing showed, fully mediated model (model C) was more parsimonious, and were chosen as most representative of this data set. The direct-effect model (model A) did not fit the data and was eliminated from further consideration. Partially mediated model (model B) had adequate fit, while the total effect of the model did not reach the significance. Also, because the direct paths of familiarity, self-congruity, identification as well as consumer value to WTPM were not significant, and only indirect paths were significant, the models (B and C) became equivalent. As a result, the fully mediated model was used to represent this data set.