A Research Of Brand Extension From The Perspectives Of Customer Value And Social Context

Brand extension not only can help companies penetrate new markets quickly, but also can help companies improve brand value, and therefore it has drawn a lot of research attention in the area of marketing. Along the advancement of technology and the development of labor division in the society, the difference of quality of different brands in the same class becomes smaller and smaller, and the role of symbolic value on brand extension becomes more and more important. However, current research has not paid enough attention to the symbolic value. Symbolic value is an external and other people oriented value, which is closely related to social situation factors. But current research has seldom considered the effects of social situation factors.Given the above background, based on the theories of customer value, brand equity, categorization, self and social facilitation as well as a thorough review of previous research of brand extension, in this dissertation I propose a study framework of brand extension from the perspective of symbolic value and social situation and conduct three studies. The first study tests the effects of the functional value and symbolic value of parent brand and perceived fit on the evaluation of symbolic and functional products, and the moderating effects of consumption situations and self-monitoring on the value and fit of parent brand, and the relationship of the moderating effects of these two variables. The second study analyzes the influence of consumption situations on the fit. The third study examines the enhancing effects of product categories and consumption situations on successful brand extension.The results of the study show that the symbolic value plays an important role in brand extension evaluation. As for the symbolic products, the consumption situations have significant impacts on the perceived fit of brand extension and have significant moderating effects on the symbolic value of parent brand and perceived fit. Specifically, compared with private consumption, in public consumption the symbolic value of parent brand is valued more in brand extension, while the effect of perceived fit on brand extension becomes less important. The moderating effect of consumption situations on symbolic value of parent brand comes from the moderating effect of self-monitoring, but its moderating effect on perceived fit does not come from self-monitoring, which may be explained by the theory of"presence of other". The enhancing effect on parent brand is higher when extending to symbolic products than extending to functional products. However, if the value of parent brand is low, extending brand in the public consumption situation may lower the evaluation of parent brand because low parent brand value leads to lower evaluation of this brand in public situation.From the perspectives of symbolic value and social situations, this study widens the scope of research in brand extension.