An Investigation On The Moderating Effect Of Thecross-Border M&AMode To The Consumers’ Attitude Towards The Parent Brand

Currently, a lot of researches are done on the mergers and acquisitions of multinational brands, but mostly are concentrated on the M&A effect of the corporate finance and overall performance, or integration mode of two brands after M&A. Research on consumers’ brand attitude change after M&A are mostly concentrated on the change of consumers’ attitude towards strong brand after M&A, while there are not too much studies on M&A mode’s (strong and weak or weak and strong) impact to consumers’attitude towards the parent brand. Therefore, this article attempts to study in the view of M&A mode’s moderating effect to the customers’attitude towards parent brand after M&A, in which the author emphasis the study on the moderating effect that "weak and strong" type of M&A mode brings to influence consumer’s attitude towards the parent brand.In this paper, literature review and empirical research methods were applied. By setting the form of mergers and acquisitions moderator; brand attitude of the consumers toward mother brand as the dependent variable; brand trust, perceived quality, domestics consciousness three factors as independent variables, studied the moderate effect of brand cross-border M&A mode towards consumers’ brand attitudes.This paper innovatively studied the form of mergers and acquisitions as the moderator to influence on consumer brand attitudes, which enriches the research onconsumer brand attitude after"weak and strong" cross-border mergers and acquisitions. And, come to the conclusion that the moderating effects of "weak and strong" type of cross-border M&A mode is stronger than " strong and weak" type on consumer brand attitudes through brand trust and national-brand consciousness factors.This will be a good reference for the enterprise to make choices on merger mode and marketing solutions.