An empirical study on consumers’ attitudes toward cross-category brand extension

Abstract

Consumer evaluations of brand extension are becoming increasingly important to the consumer market (Kaur & Pandit, 2015); however, little attention has been given to crosscategory specific research in this field. This research examines whether there are correlations between an iconic product (a product category already occupied by the brand) and its crosscategory extension product and how the user experience on an extension product affects its iconic product. The findings reveal that consumers have a positive attitude toward an extended product when they perceive credibility, quality, and innovativeness from its iconic product. Consumer perceived image-fit and advertisement-match are positively correlated with consumer attitude. The results support that the post-evaluation on an extended product affects its iconic product; however, user experience with an extended product does not correlate with consumers' evaluations of an iconic product on their evaluations of the extended product because of the survey limitation.