Chapter One  Introduction
1.1 Background
     Along with the technological advance of cell phones, modern communication tools have become more and more important in people’s life, especially cell phones, which have become most people’s necessities of life. At the same time, cell phones update more and more quickly. The competition of different kinds of cell phone brands is very intensive and fierce and every cell phone brand wants to take a place in cell phone market by taking all effective methods.
     China, as a country with a big population, supplies a great consumer group for cell phone market. Recent years, with the rapid development of China’s cell phone market, the competition between foreign and domestic cell phone brands has been increasingly intensified. And the competition of China’s mobile phone market is developing from pure product competition to comprehensive ability of marketing. From cellular phone to smart phone, China’s cell phone market has experienced a great change and gone into a relatively stable stage of development with the over ten years’ development. In addition, China’s cell phone brands have taken more market share than before. It even has some well-known domestic cell phone brand like Huawei, MIUI, Meizu, which are popular with people.
     However, compared with foreign cell phone brands, domestic cell phone brands start late. In 1996,China produced its first cell phone with GMS, which appeared ten years later than foreign cell phone. At first, when domestic cell phone brands planned to enter and occupy market, they just firmly gave up first-tier market occupied by international brands to take up second-tier or third-tier market by the way of “ encircling the cities from the rural areas”. Nowadays, domestic cell phone brands has stepped into first-tier cell phone market gradually. In this process, they have some problems need to be solved. All of those problems, “creating an advantageous brand is the favorable guarantee for enterprise to obtain tremendous intangible assets and sustained development and centralized embodiment of the comprehensive marketing ability of enterprise while brand image has a crucial core function for creating an advantageous brand”.(Jiao, 2007, p.4）
1.2 Conceptions of Brand Image
     Brand including brand name and brand mark is a key to a company’s success and brand image is the core of brand, which is closely connected with a company’s benefits, core values and corporate culture. “Brand image is studied from company’ s and consumer’s perspectives.” (Janonis & Virvilaité, 2007, p.78) Like brand personality, brand is not something you have or you don’t. A brand is unlikely to have one brand image,but several, though one or two may predominate. Brand image gains popularity by growing the feelings and images associated with a brand. Is is based on the proposition that consumers buy not only a product(commodity), but also the image associations of the product,such as power, wealth, sophistication, and most importantly identification and association with other users of the brand. In a consumer led world, people tend to define themselves and their “persona” by their possessions. According to Sigmund Freud, the ego and superego control to a large extent the image and personality that people would like others to have of them.
     Brand image is a kind of intangible asset. A company striving to achieve better results in the market in comparison with its competitors needs to acquire and particular uniqueness that cannot be imitated and provide a competitive advantage. One of such resources that can hardly be imitated is brand image.(2007) A successful brand image not only can show a company’s expression and values to consumers, but also is a very significant element to attract consumers based on the fact that consumer’s attitude towards a particular brand influences consumer’s behavior.(2007). Brand image is an important component of brand cognition according to Keller’s model. It is always taken into consideration when consumers decide whether the product is worth buying or not.  苹果品牌形象的成功对我国手机品牌推广的启示(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_24178.html