Brand associations in cooperative business relationships : structure, dimensions and spillover effects

Abstract

With the increase in inter-firm activities, whether joint promotion, co-branding, joint ventures, alliances, or other types of organisational cooperation, an individual firm stands to become much more dependent on consumers' associations with its cooperative partners. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the extent to which consumers' associations with a focal brand spill over to a partner brand and vice versa. However, there are problems associated with the measurement of a brand's associations, in particular with the measurement of trust. Consequently, in order to achieve this goal, three specific objectives were set, namely (1) to explore the structure and dimensionality of brand trust, (2) to understand the structure and dimensionality of brand association, and (3) to measure the transfer, the so-called spillover effects, of a focal brand's associations to and from a partner brand in a brand alliance context. Survey data from 386 consumers of a household paints brand, 299 consumers of a cellular network brand, 92 consumers of a cellular handsets brand and 92 organisational customers of an information technology firm explore the first two objectives. Findings suggest that brand association is better conceptualised as a multi-dimensional construct as opposed to a unidimensional multi-faceted construct. Although these findings are exploratory, there is evidence to suggest that this includes relational dimensions such as trust and reputation. However, an in-depth exploration of trust shows that a unidimensional consumer-based conceptualisation provides an acceptable measure for trust in consumer brands when compared to competing, multi-dimensional conceptualisations. In contrast, a multidimensional model of trust provides a superior conceptualisation when applied to a firm with organisational customers. The third and final objective of this thesis looks at experiment data from 91 subjects and explores the transfer of brand associations between firms in the context of a brand alliance. The results suggest that consumers' attitude toward the alliance affects their evaluation of both the focal and the partner brand. However, the strength of existing associations affects the extent to which brands are susceptible to spillover effects. Moreover, a moderating effect of familiarity was observed, whereby less familiar brands experience greater effects from the alliance than more familiar brands. No such effect was observed for antecedents of consumers' evaluation of the alliance. Thus, in this study, familiarity had no differential impact on alliance evaluation. This thesis contributes to knowledge in marketing by providing empirical evidence for the transfer and direction of brand associations in a network economy. It shows that consumers' associations with a focal brand are partly determined by their associations with a partner brand.