This research investigates how consumer evaluations of brand extensions are affected by two distinct types of brand reputation: a reputation for social responsibility built through commitments to societal obligations, versus a reputation for ability developed by delivering quality offerings. Through six studies, we establish that while the two reputation types equivalently influence high fit brand extensions, a reputation for social responsibility (vs. ability) leads to more favorable responses toward low fit brand extensions by inducing a desire to support and help the company that has acted to benefit consumers. Furthermore, the facilitative effect of social responsibility on low fit brand extension evaluations is more prominent among consumers who value close relationships and caring for one another's well‐being (i.e., those with high communal orientation), and tends to dissipate when social responsibility initiatives are tainted with self‐serving motives (i.e., when these initiatives are aligned with the brand's core offering).
Four studies, using chronic and situational self-construal, supported the proposition that individualists (collectivists) focus on within-category richness (between-category differentiation). Collectivists judged paired products as less similar than individualists did, but only at the higher level of a category hierarchy (studies 1 and 2). Further, collectivists were more context driven in product ratings in a categorization task (study 3). Study 4 focused on high-level pairs and found that under high involvement, chronic self-construal dominated judgments. Under low involvement, chronic and situational construals interacted: individualists (collectivists) were less (more) amenable to the situational construal. Implications for self-construal and categorization research are discussed. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.