Brand and category design consistency in brand extensions

This study aims to investigate the influence of two critical brand extension design components

brand design consistency and category design consistency

on the formation of consumers ' product attitudes and purchase intentions. It also aims to examine the underlying mechanism for attitude formation towards new brand extensions using processing fluency theory and the moderation of brand strength.

A 2 (brand design consistency: high vs low)×2 (category design consistency: high vs low)×2 (brand strength: strong vs weak)×2 (processing fluency: conceptual vs perceptual) between subjects experiment with 642 participants was used to test the proposed hypotheses and model.

Results obtained from SEM and ANCOVA demonstrate that both brand and category design consistencies assert significant effects on new product attitude in brand extensions; however, the relative effect of category design consistency is greater. Further, the effect of category design consistency varies as a function of brand strength, and is stronger for weak brands than for strong brands.

Brand managers should maintain consistency of extension product design with both the parent brand and the new product category, and prioritize the latter for weak brands.

This study integrates brand extension and aesthetics research on prototypicality to formulate and test important research questions, previously unexamined. Further, realistically-rendered product images, allowing both conceptual and perceptual processing, were used in the experiment to provide a better imitation of real product choices – an approach different from most extant brand extension studies, which utilize verbal stimuli.