Prior brand cognition and behavioral intention: omnichannel experience and consumer trust as complementary psychological pathways

Restaurant consumers increasingly encounter brands across interconnected online and offline touchpoints, yet less is known about how prior brand knowledge relates to the interpretation of these encounters and subsequent decision making. Drawing on customer-based brand equity, schema-based information processing, customer-journey research, and trust theory, this study examines a cognition–experience–trust–behavior model. Survey data were collected from 510 restaurant consumers in three Chinese cities who had used at least two channels of a focal restaurant brand. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted in R/lavaan, and indirect effects were assessed using 10,000 bootstrap resamples. Cognitive brand equity was positively associated with omnichannel experience and consumer trust. Omnichannel experience was positively associated with trust and behavioral intention, while trust showed the strongest proximal association with behavioral intention. All three specific indirect effects were significant, including the sequential pathway through omnichannel experience and trust, and the model explained 52.2% of the variance in behavioral intention. The findings are consistent with two complementary psychological routes: a practical route related to reduced interactional friction and a diagnostic route in which coherent cross-channel experiences provide cues associated with trust. Given the cross-sectional design, these pathways are interpreted as theory-guided associations rather than established causal processes.