PENGARUH ELEMEN EKUITAS MEREK TERHADAP PERILAKU KONSUMEN DALAM MELAKUKAN KEPUTUSAN PEMBELIAN IPHONE (Studi Pada Pengguna iPhone di Kota Semarang)

Abstract

The rapid growth of smartphone technology cause a strong competition emerge among the phone vendors to gain market share. iPhone, which in recent years had been on top of smartphone market share in some regions around the world, is now having a serious threat from Android-based smartphones, especially Samsung. Although iPhone sales are rising, it seems that they haven’t been able to increase its market share from year to year. Those phenomenons become the background of this study. This study aims to know the influence of brand equity elements, which are the brand awareness, perceived quality, brand associations, and brand loyalty, toward the iPhone purchase decisions. This study was done with the iPhone consumers in Semarang as the respondents, with the number of samples specified are as much as 100 respondents and using accidental sampling method. The data obtained were analyzed trough the validity test, reliability test, the classic assumptions test, multiple regression analysis, hypothesis testing using the t-test, F-test, and analysis of the determination coefficient (R2). From the results of the regression analysis, the most influential variable for iPhone purchase decisions is the perceived quality (X2) which has a coefficient of 0.352, followed by brand loyalty variable (X4) which has a coefficient of 0.288, then brand awareness variable (X1) which has a coefficient of 0.225, and brand association (X3) as the least influential variable, which has a coefficient of 0.203. Hypothesis testing using the t-test indicates that the four independent variables used in this study are proved to be significantly affect the purchasing decisions, then using the F-test reveal that all independent variables are adequate to examine the dependent variable. Adjusted R Square of 0.541 shows that 54.1 percent of purchase decision variance is explained by the four independent variables in regression equation, whereas the other 45.9 percent is explained by other variables