Consumer Joint Brand Attitude Transfer Path

Co-branding was applied into business practices in the early day. The cooperation of Ford Auto and Bridge Stone tire can be traced backed to 1908. Juliette Boone brought up the concept of co-branding since Red Robster opened in Holiday Inn in 1980.Since 1980s, co-branding was generally put in use in management, especially in credit card, retail sale, aviation, and computer industry. As a tactics in business competition, co-branding strategy can not only help to solid market, but also help to reduce the cost and risk of launching new product and service. With the trend of merge and acquisition, co-branding has become popular in multinational enterprises, such as Sony-Ericsson, Konica-Minolta, Daimler-Chrysler. The alliance of NutraSweet and Coca-Cola, Intel and well-known PC manufactures also demonstrate the successful example of ingredient-branding.With the maturity of co-branding concept, research on this topic becomes meaningful in practice. Co-branding grabs more attention in academic field after Norris and Rao brought up this academic topic in early 1990s (Keller, 1993; Spethmann & Benezra, 1994; Blackett & Board, 1997; Simonin & Ruth, 1998). Besides, study on brand attitude transfer mostly concentrated in the brand extension field, how the parent brand attitude transferred to the extension brand, and the effect on buying behaviors of extension brand (Park C. W, Milbergs, Lawson R., 1991; Broniarczyk & Alba, 1994; Bhat & Reddy, 2001; Czellar, 2003).From the perspective of consumers, the paper intends to bring up a comprehensive and systematic theoretic model named co-branding attitude transfer path. Through theoretical exploration and empirical study on co-branding attitude transfer, and further discussion on generated path of co-branding, this study fills the gap of academic research, and provides reference for business decision-making.After determination of the theoretical model and empirical methods, the pre-test has been conducted to get consumer perspective understanding of smart phone, and then on the basis of the result, the formal questionnaire is conducted for the formal test on the common consumers. Random sampling survey in two cities: Shanghai and Urumq, Xinjiang province. The total feedback of questionnaire is about 800, in which the effective pre-test questionnaire is 100, the effective formal is 587. After the data analysis on the effective test questionnaire, the main conclusions of the study are summarized as follows: Firstly, study on the features of consumer groups. According to two dimensions: the evaluation degree of information on co-branding and the degree of co-branding significance cognitive, the consumers are divided into four types after the analysis on practical statistical data: (1)The proportion of the expert consumers who are familiar with the information of co-branding and recognize its significance is about 27%; (2)The proportion of the function-pursued consumers who are vague in brand information but recognize its significance is about 39%; (3)The proportion of the indefinite consumers who are vague in brand information and less recognize its significance is about 6%; (4)The proportion of the emotion-pursued consumers who are familiar with brand information but less recognize its significance is about 28%. The different features of consumers reveals to the different co-branding attitude transfer path.Secondly, study on co-branding attitude transfer path. The theory foundation of the paper is same as others, that is, the brand includes two attributions: product-related and non-product-related. Therefore, the brand attitude transfer path contains product-related transfer path and brand emotion (non-product-related) transfer path. Owing to the co-branding is a composite brand conception, the brand transfer path is more complicated which contains four types: (1) The expert consumers tend to co-branding product attribution and brand emotion transfer paths;(2) The function-pursued consumers tend to ingredient brand attribution transfer path;(3) The indefinite consumers tend to themselves-unknown transfer path; (4) The emotion-pursued consumers tend to host brand emotion transfer path. The expert consumers and the function-pursued consumers tend to brand attribution transfer path, however, they belong to the different market segmentation because of the different degree of co-branding evaluation information. And the expert consumers and the emotion-pursued consumers tend to brand emotion transfer path, however, they belong to the different market segmentation because of the different degree of co-branding significance cognitive.Through the empirical study and theoretic analysis on the co-branding attitude transfer path, the paper further discusses the co-branding generated path. The co-branding has three expressive forms: first, the host brand and ingredient brands have common role in the terminal product brand (co-branding), second, integration of the ingredient brands, third, host brand-leading. These three forms reflect three different development stages of co-branding generated path which the mobile phone industry enterprises either are to be the terminal of the industry, contacting the consumers and exercising influence over the purchase-decision directly, or to be the invisible champion of the sub-industry chain, through technology innovation, having such specialization as scarce resources to realize the integration and cooperation with others, leading the demands and attention of the consumers indirectly.Last, although consumers tend to the different co-branding attitude transfer path, the transfer paths have a direct positive impact on the purchase-intension of the co-branding. In the paper, the in-depth exploration on the different consumer has the different contribution to the co-branding purchase-intension.