Examining the Influence of Marketing Communication and Brand Identity on Consumer Decisions

This study aims to investigate how marketing communication and brand identity lead the consumers made the purchase decisions, especially on emerging markets. Despite previous literature’s recognition of the influence of branding and messaging on consumer behaviour, other empirical studies have not examined how branding and messaging jointly affect sales effort, brand management, and consumer belief in brand trust. In this research, the gap identified is addressed by how strategic communication and identity alignment can direct consumer decision making. It is based on a quantitative cross sectional design which involved distributed of a structured questionnaire among consumers in sectors across Pakistan. The model was tested via bootstrapping PLS-SEM. In order to confirm the robustness of the proposed framework, reliability, validity, path coefficients and model fitness indices were all evaluated. It was found that marketing communication has a strong effect on brand identity (β = 0.70) that has a positive impact on sales effort. Confirming the key hypotheses, consumer purchase decisions are determined by sales effort and consumer belief in brand (β = 0.38 and β = 0.43, respectively). The structural model was strong (SRMR = 0.067, GoF = 0.39). It offers original insights by way of validation of a multi-construct branding model and provides brand managers with practical implications related to the shaping of integrated, trust driven marketing strategies.