Impact of Dominance and Relatedness on Brand Extensions

Abstract

This research investigated how a consumer's cognitive structure for a brand in a given product category affects the possible transfer of associations to other product categories. One key factor in evaluating such possible brand extensions is dominance, which can be defined as the strength of the directional association between the parent category and the branded product. Likewise, another important factor is the relatedness of the brand's parent category and the target category of the proposed extension. The 1st experiment measured dominance and relatedness via response latencies to recognize brand extensions. The 2nd experiment demonstrated that consumers’ affect for strongly category‐dominant brands (a) transfers better to an extension when the proposed extension is closely rather than distantly related to the parent category and (b) transfers better than a weakly category‐dominant brand's affect. Together, the research demonstrated that consumers’ response times to disconfirm the existence of product‐brand pairs is related to their transfer of affect from the brand to the proposed product category. This disconfirmation method could be used as an unobtrusive measure for determining brand boundaries. The attractiveness of potential brand extensions may thus be determined without consumers making any judgments about a proposed extension other than answering whether or not it exists.

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