Role of Extrinsic Cues in the Formation of Quality Perceptions

Abstract

Examining the quality perceptions of consumers has often been recommended as an international research paradigm. This study is grounded in the Pakistani consumer market to evaluate the impact of food packaging cues on perceived product quality. The moderating effect of consumer knowledge was also taken into consideration in the study. A signaling theory was used in the study for its established predictive power in consumer behavior, marketing, and various fields of research. Based on the essence of the signaling theory, this study hypothesized that food packaging cues cast a positive impact on perceived product quality and consumer knowledge moderates these relationships. By using the sample of 504 consumers, data were gathered using the mall intercept method following a multi-stage sampling technique. The responses were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social sciences (SPSS) and Smart Partial Least Square (PLS). The findings of this study unveil that the extrinsic cues' brand name, price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels were positively and significantly related to the perceived product quality. However, the country of origin cast no impact on the perceived product quality. Consumer knowledge reflected a moderation effect on the relationships between brand name and country of origin with the perceived product quality whereas it exerted no moderation impact on the relationships of price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels with the perceived product quality. As the results exhibit that Pakistani consumers rely on food packaging cues for perceiving a product, hence it is recommended that marketers and policymakers develop appropriate marketing strategies focused on the significance of food packaging cues.

Understanding the cross-cultural chicken consumers' behavior

“…Detailed descriptions of the measurement scales and their sources are as follows. We employed five items from Kung et al (2021) and Javeed et al (2022) to examine BF and three items to measure BA (Mai et al 2023;Kamboj et al 2023). We used three elements from Chang and Chen (2022) and Mai et al (2023) to measure SN, four items from Song et al (2017) and Shen and Chen (2020) to examine BC, and evaluated PI using three elements from Ruangkanjanases et al (2020) and Wang et al (2022a).…”

“…The link between BF and PI has been examined from diverse perspectives, including cognitive and psychological perspectives, rational processes and the outcome of advertising food quality attributes on individual CB (Sreen et al 2018;Afzal et al 2019). For instance, production processing attributes and intrinsic and extrinsic factors positively influence individual shopping decisions (Cozzio et al 2020;Kumar et al 2021;Javeed et al 2022). In the context of chicken meat, BF is a vital component in PI and APB; hence, this study proposes the following hypotheses: H 2a : Buying features positively influence consumer purchase intention towards CM.…”

The impact of servitization on perceived quality, purchase intentions and recommendation intentions in the ready-to-wear sector

“…According to signaling theory, information asymmetries can occur in the consumer markets, such as in assessing the quality of products (Treiblmaier and Garaus, 2023). The signaling theory has been initiated for the job market but extended to examine various topics in marketing, including quality perceptions (Spence, 1973;Javeed et al, 2022). Signals are actions and messages of companies that reduce the information asymmetry between consumers and companies regarding the company's activities and products (Spence, 2002).…”

“…The sender (company or brand) communicates (servitizationrelated) information as a signal, and the receiver (consumer) interprets the signal (Connelly et al, 2011). For example, food product labels act as a signaling mechanism and increase perceived quality (Javeed et al, 2022;Treiblmaier and Garaus, 2023). Similarly, certain firm behaviors, such as offering warranties, can signal a brand's ability (Kirmani and Rao, 2000;Rosengren et al, 2020) because quality is often coupled with repairing garments to increase longevity (McQueen et al, 2022).…”

Culturally mixed co-branding product framing in China: the role of cultural sensitivity, product quality, and purchase probability

“…Product quality perception. Signaling theory considers consumer formation of quality perceptions through various signals, such as extrinsic cues (e.g., country of origin), as an important medium for assessing product quality (Javeed et al, 2022). If a country is associated with a brand or product, its image can influence consumer perceptions of product quality (Jin et al, 2020).…”