Consumer Evaluation of Brand Extension: Empirical Generalization and Comparative Analysis

Increasing costs involved in building new brands motivate marketers to adopt an alternate route for new product introductions, in the form of brand extensions. Consumer attitude towards brand extensions has been previously studied through multiple replications of Aaker and Keller’s attitude based model. While multiple studies exist with comparative analysis of the original model and its replication, there is no such recent comparison of all such studies for more than a decade since Bottomley and Holden (2000). During this period, several replications of Aaker and Keller’s model have been performed, some of them being in the emerging economies as well. In the context of India, which is one of the fastest growing emerging economies, there has only been one study of the Aaker and Keller model (Patro and Jaiswal 2003). The study involved hypothetical extensions and used a small sample size. Moving beyond hypothetical extensions, we conducted a replication study with a sample representative of the Indian population, comprising of 837 respondents, using real brands and their real extensions. Regression results from our study are compared with all the replication studies for Aaker and Keller’s model, performed and published thus far. We also account for residual centering as proposed in Bottomley and Holden (2000). Our comparison extends the comparative analysis from Bottomley and Holden (2000) with five additional studies, including our own extensive study. Regression results of thirteen data sets in the current study, spread across both developed and emerging economies, reveal general consistency in the significance for quality, fit related variables and interaction between the two on determining attitude toward brand extension, as hypothesized by Aaker and Keller. Primary implication of this comparative analysis suggests that multinational firms planning to enter emerging economies can leverage their parent brand equity and introduce suitable local extensions by considering quality and fit related perceptions of the parent brand and proposed brand extension.