INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC & TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH VOLUME 9, ISSUE 01, JANUARY 2020 ISSN 2277-8616 4309 IJSTR©2020 www.ijstr.org Strategy Of Stimulating Purchase Intention Of Private Label Brands (Plb) Retno Mulatsih; Amie Kusumawardhani Abstract: This research aims to find out some factors which can lead the consumer's purchase intention towards Private Label Brand (PLB) product. Moreover, this research is intended to bridge the gap of research results between store image perception and purchase intention of private label brands.The amount of the sample used are 147 respondents of Alfamart customers who know the Alfamart private label product, and the data were analyzed by using SEM Amos 22. The result shows that there are positive and significant impacts of Store Image Perception (SIP) towards Private Label Brands image (PLB Image), SIP towards PQ PLB, PQ PLB towards PLB Image, and PQ PLB towards PI PLB; whereas the impact of SIP towards Purchase Intention of PLB and the impact of PLB Image towards Purchase intention of PLB show insignificant results. Keywords:, Perceived Quality of Private Label Brands, Private Label Brands Image, Purchase Intention of Private Label Brands, Store Image Perception ———————————————————— 1. INTRODUCTION Retail business is very popular in Indonesia nowadays. It seems to grow fast and becomes a new phenomenon that is developing. Retail business is a business that is easy to implement, and able to provide a lot of profits.Retail business can be formed as traditional trade or modern retail such as minimarket, supermarket and hypermarket. The existence of retail business will make the consumer easy to shop safely. It also provides an accessable location and so many variation of goods in which most of all daily needs are available at one retail store. When modern retail stores are growing and developing at the same time, the competition level of the companies also becomes higher so that they compete to impress their consumers by using various strategies. One of those strategies is differentiation strategy through private label brands. The emergence of the retailer as a brand is considered as one of the most important trend in retail business (Grewal et al., 2004). Almost all of modern retail trades apply this strategy, and it is increasingly growing. Several modern retailers which apply Private Label Brands strategy in Indonesia are Superindo, Fordmart, Carrefour, Giant, Hero, Hypermart, Indomaret, Alfamart, and even now department store such as Matahari also applies this private label brands strategy. According to Bell et al. (2010), Private Label Brandsis a product made by retailer who uses the name of its retail company’s name. Whereas according to Beneke (2010), Private Label Brandsis a prime brand at a store used as an identity and quality of the company, and then is viewed as the main source of company's profitability. Private label /store brands /house brand can be understood as the product specially packaged in a packaging that labels the identity of the place where sells it, and this product can only be obtained in that place. While according to Ailawadi and Keller (2004), store brand, called as private label brand or independent brand, is a brand owned and sold by the retailer in his/her own outlet. Related to Brand Association or brand image, Aaker (1996) stated that brand image is all the things or impressions emerged in consumers mind that stick on her/his memory about a certain brand. The impression and association related to certain brand will be strengthened along with more and more experience in consuming certain brand and the emergence of that brand more oftenly in certain media that conveys a message/information to its consumer. Aaker also defined brand awareness as a potential consumers ability to recognize or recall a brand and relate it to certain product category. This research is built from the gap of researches between store image perception and store brand purchase intention. Diallo (2012) showed the result that store image perception did not give positive influence significantly towards store brand purchase intention. Meanwhile, research of Bao, et al. (2011) gave result that store image influenced positively and significantly towards purchase intention. From those two different research results, then a research model is built in which it will be shown in this article to explore the factors that can stimulate purchase intention of PLB, so it can increase the retail company profit. For bridging the gap of that researches, in this research model the variables of Private Label Brands image and perceived quality of Private Label Brands are inserted. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES 2.1 Purchase Intention of Private Label Brands (PLB) Purchase intention is a possibility that the consumer will plan or willing to buy a certain product or service in the future (Wu et al., 2011) and considered as an appropriate step to be realized on the actual purchasing behavior. The measurement of purchase intention actually shows the behavior of future purchasing (Grewal et al., 1998). To explore what encourages people to buy Private Label Brands, the main thing that must be acknowledged is that the decision of purchasing can be influenced by several needs including physiological and/or socio-physiological (e.g.: prestige, confession, comfort), and then focus on the possible factors in creating customer's behavior towards Private Label Brands product. Purchase intention refers to the effort of buying product or service (Dodds et al., 1991). The purchase intention of consumer from the retail shop is influenced by several external factors such as product, _________________________________ • Retno Mulatsih, SE, MM : Ph.D Student at Faculty Economics and Business, Universitas Diponegoro, Indonesia; Lecture at Sekolah Tinggi Maritim dan Transpor “AMNI” Semarang, Indonesia E-mail: retno.stimart.amni@gmail.com • Amie Kusumawardhani, MSc, Phd : Lecturer at Departement of Management, Faculty Economics and Business, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia E-mail: amiekusumawardhani@gmail.com