Drivers of Brand Extension Success Völckner, Franziska; Sattler, Henrik
Journal of marketing,
04/2006, Volume:
70, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The research presented in this article addresses the issue of the significance and relative importance of the determinants of extension success by simultaneously investigating ten success factors. ...The empirical analysis considers the direct relationships between success factors and extension success, the structural relationships among investigated factors, and moderating effects. The authors find that fit between the parent brand and an extension product is the most important driver of brand extension success, followed by marketing support, parent-brand conviction, retailer acceptance, and parent-brand experience. The authors also find several important structural relationships among the investigated success factors (e.g., marketing support → fit → retailer acceptance → extension success). Finally, the interaction terms of fit with the quality of the parent brand and with parent-brand conviction are statistically significant, albeit of relatively low importance.
When governments mandated lockdowns to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the resulting reduction of face-to-face communication threatened many people's psychological well-being by fostering ...feelings of loneliness. Given social media's eponymous social nature, we study the relationship between people's social media usage and their loneliness during these times of physical social restrictions. We contrast literature highlighting the social value of social media with a competing logic based on the "internet paradox," according to which increased social media usage may paradoxically be associated with increasing, not decreasing, levels of loneliness. As the extant literature provides opposing correlational insights into the general relationship of social media usage and loneliness, we offer competing hypotheses and offer novel longitudinal insights into the phenomenon of interest. In the empirical context of Germany's initial lockdown, our research uses survey panel data from February 2020 (before the lockdown) and April 2020 (during the lockdown) to contribute longitudinal evidence to the matter. We find that more usage of social media in the studied lockdown setting is indeed associated with more, not less loneliness. Thus, our results suggest a "social media paradox" when physical social restrictions are mandated and caution social media users and policy makers to not consider social media as a valuable alternative for social interaction. A post-hoc analysis suggests that more communication via richer digital media which are available during physical lockdowns (e.g., video chats) softens the "social media paradox". Conclusively, this research provides deeper insights into the social value of social interactions via digital media during lockdowns and contributes novel insights into the relationship between social media and loneliness during such times when physical social interaction is heavily restricted.
This article focuses on the measurement of the overall importance of brands for consumer decision making—that is, brand relevance in category, or BRiC—across multiple categories and countries. ...Although brand equity measures for specific brands have attracted a large body of literature, the questions of how important brands are within an entire product category and the extent to which BRiC differs across categories and countries have been neglected. The authors introduce the concept of BRiC (a category-level measure, not a brand-level measure). They develop a conceptual framework to measure BRiC and the drivers of BRiC, test the framework empirically with a sample of more than 5700 consumers, and show how the construct varies across 20 product categories and five countries (France, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The results suggest a high validity of the proposed BRiC measure and show substantial differences between categories and countries. A replication study two-and-a-half years later confirms the psychometric properties of the suggested scale and shows remarkable stability of the findings. The findings have important implications for the management of brand investments.
John, Loken, Kim, and Monga (2006) have introduced brand concept maps (BCM) as a powerful approach to measuring brand image according to the structure of the underlying brand association networks and ...reveal the strength and uniqueness of brand associations. Interestingly, BCM, as well as other consumer mapping techniques, do not incorporate explicit measures for the favorability of brand associations. This study extends the original BCM approach with explicit information on the favorability of single brand associations and, further, develops a new metric, brand association network value (BANV), which quantifies overall network favorability. Our advanced BCM approach and the new BANV metric are managerially relevant in that they allow for comparison of the favorability of networks at both individual brand association and aggregate network levels. We illustrate the relevance of our BANV metric within an empirical application and demonstrate its validity.
This study investigates Black and White consumers' preferences for Black versus White people in United States advertising contexts over 66 y, from 1956 until 2022, a time in which the United States ...has experienced significant ethno-racial diversification. Examining Black and White consumers' reactions to visual advertising over more than half a century offers a unique and dynamic view of interracial preferences. Mass advertising reaches an audience of billions and can shape people's attitudes and behavior, emphasizing the relevance of clarifying the influence of race in advertising, how it has evolved over time, and how it may contribute to mitigating discrimination based on racial perceptions. A meta-analysis of extant experiments into the relationship between the depicted endorser's race (i.e., the model in a visual ad) and the reaction of Black and White viewers pertains to 332 effect sizes from 62 studies reported in 52 scientific papers, comprising 10,186 Black and White participants. Our results are anchored in a conceptual framework, including a comprehensive set of perceiver (viewer), target (endorser), social/societal context, and publication characteristics. Without accounting for temporal dynamics, the results indicate ingroup favoritism, such that White viewers prefer White models and Black viewers prefer Black models. But by controlling for the publication year, it is possible to observe a time-dependent trend: Historically, White consumers preferred endorsers of the same race, but this preference has significantly shifted toward Black endorsers in recent years. In contrast, the level of Black consumers' reactions to endorsers of the same race remains largely unchanged over time.
This study investigates Black and White consumers’ preferences for Black versus White people in United States advertising contexts over 66 y, from 1956 until 2022, a time in which the United States ...has experienced significant ethno-racial diversification. Examining Black and White consumers’ reactions to visual advertising over more than half a century offers a unique and dynamic view of interracial preferences. Mass advertising reaches an audience of billions and can shape people’s attitudes and behavior, emphasizing the relevance of clarifying the influence of race in advertising, how it has evolved over time, and how it may contribute to mitigating discrimination based on racial perceptions. A meta-analysis of extant experiments into the relationship between the depicted endorser’s race (i.e., the model in a visual ad) and the reaction of Black and White viewers pertains to 332 effect sizes from 62 studies reported in 52 scientific papers, comprising 10,186 Black and White participants. Our results are anchored in a conceptual framework, including a comprehensive set of perceiver (viewer), target (endorser), social/societal context, and publication characteristics. Without accounting for temporal dynamics, the results indicate ingroup favoritism, such that White viewers prefer White models and Black viewers prefer Black models. But by controlling for the publication year, it is possible to observe a time-dependent trend: Historically, White consumers preferred endorsers of the same race, but this preference has significantly shifted toward Black endorsers in recent years. In contrast, the level of Black consumers’ reactions to endorsers of the same race remains largely unchanged over time.
Although many brand managers favor the use of celebrities in advertisements, others worry that celebrities overshadow the brand and thus impair brand recall. Practitioners refer to this overshadowing ...as the vampire effect, defined as a decrease in brand recall for an advertising stimulus that features a celebrity endorser versus the same stimulus with an unknown but equally attractive endorser. Because there is no agreement about whether this overshadowing really exists, this research analyzes the existence of the vampire effect and its moderators in a series of experiments with a total of 4,970 respondents. The results provide important insights into how to avoid the vampire effect by creating appropriate conditions, such as high endorser–brand congruence or a strong cognitive link between the celebrity and the brand. Surprisingly, brand familiarity does not significantly moderate the effect.
Consumer File Sharing of Motion Pictures Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten; Henning, Victor; Sattler, Henrik
Journal of marketing,
10/2007, Volume:
71, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Illegal consumer file sharing of motion pictures is considered a major threat to the movie industry. Whereas industry advocates and some scholars postulate a cannibalistic effect on commercial forms ...of movie consumption, other researchers deny this effect, though sound evidence is lacking on both sides. Drawing on extant research and utility theory, the authors present hypotheses on the consequences and determinants of consumer file sharing and test them with data from a controlled longitudinal panel study of German consumers. The data contain information on the consumers' intentions toward and actual behavior in relation to the consumption of 25 new motion pictures, allowing the authors to study more than 10,000 individual file-sharing opportunities. The authors test the effect of file sharing on commercial movie consumption using a series of ReLogit regression analyses and apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to identify the determinants of consumer file sharing. They find evidence of substantial cannibalization of theater visits, DVD rentals, and DVD purchases responsible for annual revenue losses of $300 million in Germany. Five categories of file-sharing behavior drive file sharing and have a significant impact on how consumers obtain and watch illegal movie copies. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Companies spend large amounts of money to induce word of mouth (WOM) and spread it among consumers. This research introduces the concept of “WOM relevance,” which measures the importance of WOM for ...consumers’ purchase-decision process in a specific category. It uses three studies to develop and validate a parsimonious scale to measure WOM relevance at the consumer level across various product categories and different types of WOM, and applies the scale in an additional set of five studies. Specifically, this research disentangles the consumer-level and category components of WOM relevance; shows that the consumer-level variation is (much) larger than the category-level variation; and provides insights into differences in WOM relevance across categories, consumers, and WOM types. It also empirically shows that electronic WOM relevance relates to consumers’ search behavior and consideration-set formation in an online-shopping environment. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the proposed scale predicts choices as well as a more sophisticated choice model does. Finally, this research shows that WOM relevance influences not only consumers’ own purchase-decision process but also their intentions to retransmit others’ WOM messages.
