The Effect Study Of Brand Relationship Quality On Brand Extension Evaluation

With the rapid economic development, increasingly fierce competition in the market, scientific and technical innovations shortens the product life cycles and consumer demands are fast changing as well. Faced with such a tough market environment, companies have to constantly develop new products in order to grasp the opportunities of surviving and developing. In real life, it is common that new products fail during market entry phase, mainly due to increased marketing costs, increased difficulty of accessing to distribution channels and low recognition from customers. To get out of this predicament, brand extension has become the primary strategy of launching new products. Under the Chinese cultural background which attaches great importance to relationships, whether brand relationship can help companies win brand recognition from customers through extended products has become a focus of business concerns.From an innovative perspective of brand relationship quality, this paper discusses the attitudes of customers to brand extension, enriching the brand extension research. Through literature review, the definitions of brand relationship quality, customer perceived value and brand extension evaluation are clarified. Based on the literature review of the relationship between the variables, the research framework is set up: The affection of the Brand relationship quality on customers’appraisal of brand extension can be directly achieved, or indirectly through customer perceived value.The research combines the methods of literature analysis and empirical research to analyze the assumptions and theoretical model.369valid questionnaires were collected through on-site and online questionnaire research. Using SPSS software to analyze the empirical data, the following conclusions are reached:(1) Brand relationship quality has a direct positive effect on brand extension evaluation; Satisfaction, trust, commitment has a positive impact on the perceived quality of the product extension; Satisfaction and commitment have a positive effect on purchase intention to extended products.(2) The Brand relationship quality influences the brand extension evaluation through functional value, lost value and social value, but no emotional value.(3) Despite the controversy among the scholars, the most general accepted dimensions of the approaches to research the Brand relationship quality includes Satisfaction, Trust and Commitment, which are the most valid and reliable factors also. Based on the conclusion of above mentioned theories, the advice to the enterprises is to build up and maintain the Brand relationship quality with the customers in a long term. During this long term, the most crucial mission needs to be completed is the cultivation of the "Commitment". Lastly, the Brand relationship quality is necessarily to be taken into consideration in the strategy of Brand extension.