Visual Perception Experiment Study on the Brand Effect - Comparison of Domestic and Imported Car Brand -

Conspicuous consumption is often investigated in Korea and consumers purchase a product to publicly display economic power or social status. The existing studies argue that brand loyalty and luxury brand preferences escalate conspicuous consumption, and it is important to identify different visual perception to understand irrational consumers' behavior. Car emblem as brands' visual identity represents the brand's image, mission and message. Irrational consumers thus are expected have different visual perception to the emblem or logo. To understand the impact of irrational consumer behavior on visual perception, this study explored how brand loyalty and luxury brand preferences impact on the visual perception of car emblems between Korean domestic brand and imported brand. This study used eye tracking technology to measure the respondents' attention on an emblem of the cars. Eye tracking tools analyze fixations and measure the attention on a specific area of interests (AOI). This study explored the maintaining time and frequency on AOI, as well as explored the size of pupil to identify the respondents' attention on the AOI. In this experiment, the logos of domestic cars (i.e., Hyundai and Kia) and foreign cars (i.e., Mercedes-Benz and BMW) were swapped to see how irrational consumer behavior impact on visual perception of car emblem.