Slovak Consumer's Perception of the Product Policy Activities in the Process of Brand Value Building and Managing

Abstract

Nowadays, markets are globalized, number of competitors increases and customer's demands for production are elevated. Therefore businesses begin to realize the competitive potential, which has the brand. This is the reason why we decided to realize the survey focused on the perception of marketing activities aimed at brand value building and managing from the point of view of Slovak customers. We based this research on the assumption that the perception of these activities by Slovak customers will be arising from long-term exposure to mechanisms of centrally planned economy different in comparison with other countries. According to us, these differences are a possible barrier to the application of knowledge from abroad, which may ultimately disadvantage not only Slovak businesses which implement general branding strategies, but also foreign brands entering the Slovak market. In this contribution, we focused only on analyzing the perception of activities within the product policy. The survey was realized by method of standardized direct questioning in a statistic sample of 384 respondents, which can be considered relevant for the purposes of formulating generally valid conclusions. We found, that the brand influences the customer buying behavior of majority of respondents, that the perception of brand value is mostly influenced by own experience, that branded production has better quality in comparison with no-branded production according to respondents and that there is no relationship between the average net monthly income of the respondent's family and his assessment of the brand quality.