Consumer-Perceived Value Systems and Sustainable NEV Brand Competitiveness: The Mediating Role of Perceived Sustainable Value

Abstract

This paper examines how the four dimensions of consumer-perceived value, namely value proposition, value creation, value acquisition, and value maintenance, promote the long-term competitiveness of New Energy Vehicle (NEV) brands in China through perceived sustainable value. Conducted a survey of 1,200 Chinese consumers who have purchased and driven new-energy vehicles to collect data. First, reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and common method bias were tested, and then structural equation modeling and a 5,000-sample bootstrap mediation analysis were performed. Both value proposition and value maintenance have direct and indirect effects on customer-based sustainable NEV brand competitiveness, with partial mediation. Value creation and value acquisition had a small direct impact; instead, they reduced brand competitiveness by lowering the perceived sustainable value and were fully mediated. Not all enterprise value activities are continuous drivers of brand competitiveness. The competitive effect of the above depends on how much consumers believe that these provide functional, social, emotional, and sustainability-related values. Clarify the link between the value system of a business model and customeroriented brand competition in the New Energy Vehicle (NEV) industry. Therefore, the NEV company needs to make a distinction between visible indicators of value, such as reasonable prices and excellent after-sales service, and invisible forms of value, such as ecosystem construction, community building, and price mechanisms. The latter need to have better transparency and user-friendliness before they can boost brand competitiveness.