The identification of drivers of brand extension success has drawn considerable interest over the years from both academicians and practitioners (e.g. Hou 2003; Volckner and Sattler 2006). With few exceptions however (e.g. de Ruyter and Wetzels 2000; Hemet al. 2003; Lei et al. 2004; Martinez and Pina 2005; van Riel et al. 2001), the investigation extension of brands whose original market offering is a service, has been neglected. Instead, prior research has primarily focused on product-to-product brand extensions in the fast moving consumer goods category. Consequently, marketing practitioners have been offered limited theoretical or practical guidance regarding brand portfolio strategies that include service brand extensions. Against this background, the primary objectives of this research are 1.) to analyze the drivers of service brand extension success and 2.) to compare them with the drivers of success of product brand extension success.In this paper, based on prior research on brand extensions a conceptual framework for service brand extensions is developed and empirically tested that includes direct and indirect effects of eight potential success factors. Data were collected with an online survey leading to an effective sample size of 380. Two versions of questionnaires were used for data collection: A service brand and a product brand extension version. Each version included two well-known service resp. product parent brands each with two potential extension products and two potential extension services. This procedure enabled an analysis of eight different combinations of a parent brand and hypothetical service extension and eight different combinations of a parent brand and a hypothetical extension product. Thus, 3,040 cases were included in data analysis.Linear structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. Analyzing the framework for service brand extensions results show that the fit of the parent-brand and the extension is the most important driver of success with a relative importance of 60.3% (total effects) followed by the history of previous brand extensions (12.6%), the quality of the parent-brand (9.9%), consumer innovativeness (7.9%), linkage of the utility of the parent-brand to service attributes (5.3%) and the perceived risk of unknown brands ( 4.0% ). No significant effect on the success of service brand extensions could be found for parent-brand conviction and the parent-brand experience.When comparing the results to the drivers of success of product brand extensions several significant differences could be found. The influence of the quality of the parent-brand on parent-brand conviction, quality of the parent-brand on parentbrand experience, fit on brand extension success, and the linkage of the utility of the parent brand on the quality of the parentbrand are much stronger for product brand extensions than for service brand extensions. In conclusion, the study shows that success factors identified in previous studies relating to manufactured goods cannot unconditionall...
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