Image Reinforcement or Impairment: The Effects of Co-Branding on Attribute Uncertainty
- 1 June 2005
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier BV in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
Co-branding is often used by managers to reinforce the image of their brands. In this paper, we investigate when a brand's image is reinforced or impaired as a result of co-branding, and which partner is right for a firm that considers co-branding for image reinforcement. We address these issues by examining the effects of co-branding on attribute uncertainty of partner brands. We conceptualize attribute beliefs as two-dimensional constructs. The first dimension reflects the expected value of the attribute, while the second dimension reflects the degree of certainty about the attribute. We argue that these parameters are updated after consumers are exposed to a co-branding activity and develop an analytical model that incorporates these notions. Based on categorization theory, the model describes the updating mechanism of partner brand beliefs that occur as a result of co-branding. An analysis of the model leads to several propositions, which we test in an experiment. Our findings indicate that it is not necessarily in a brand's best interest to choose a partner that is of the highest performance possible. Moreover, we find that while expected values of the brand attributes may improve as a result of co-branding, under certain conditions, uncertainty associated with the brands increases through the alliance, increasing the risk of image impairment.Keywords
This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Effects of Ingredient Branding Strategies on Host Brand ExtendibilityJournal of Marketing, 2002
- A Connectionist Model of Brand–Quality AssociationsJournal of Marketing Research, 2000
- The Quality Double WhammyMarketing Science, 1999
- The Effects of Extensions on Brand Name Dilution and EnhancementJournal of Marketing Research, 1998
- A Dynamic Process Model of Service Quality: From Expectations to Behavioral IntentionsJournal of Marketing Research, 1993
- A Process-Tracing Study of Brand Extension EvaluationJournal of Marketing Research, 1991
- "Schema abstraction" in a multiple-trace memory model.Psychological Review, 1986
- Induction of category distributions: A framework for classification learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1984
- The need for cognition.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1982
- Remarks on the Distribution of in Sampling from a Normal Mixture, and Normal Type A DistributionJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1973