Brand alliance is drawing attention as the strategic alternative of launching a new product for businesses today. Not only this strategic alternative facilitate the leveraging of prior brand's equity, but also the strategy enable the host brand to rec...
Brand alliance is drawing attention as the strategic alternative of launching a new product for businesses today. Not only this strategic alternative facilitate the leveraging of prior brand's equity, but also the strategy enable the host brand to receive the positive halo effect from the alliance brand by collaborating with the speciality company in the business which has expertise in technology or is able to provide the core parts of the product. Also, consumers evaluate technology-leading expert brands affirmatively and brand alliance with those expert brands positively influence consumers' purchase decision-making. Therefore, researches about ingredient branding strategies as brand alliance has displayed great increase as a reflection of the trend. However, no researches about effects after withdrawal of ingredient branding strategies exist, although those are important features when marketers consider the brand alliance. Thus, this study aims to prove the negative impacts of the withdrawal of ingredient branding strategies to consumers' brand attitude, with the moderation effects of importance of features of ingredient brand (important features versus trivia features), and brand power between host brand and ingredient brand (ingredient branding power is greater than host brand's versus there are no difference between host brand and ingredient brand).
The results are followings; 1) When ingredient branding strategy contains withdrawal of their alliance with host brand, the negative impact on the host brand was greater than the case when ingredient branding strategy is maintained, 2) Withdrawal of the important features showed stronger negative effect to the consumers' attitudes toward the host brand than withdrawal of the trivia features did; in case the ingredient strategy was maintained, no significant differences were observed, 3) When ingredient branding strategy contained withdrawal of their alliance with host brand, consumers' attitude toward the host brand suffered more significantly in case the ingredient brand was more powerful than the case two brands had identical brand power, 4) When ingredient branding strategy maintained, results did not show significant difference between change types of ingredient branding strategy.
According to these results, this study contribute theoretical implications to current studies that withdrawal of ingredient branding can produce negative effect to brand attitude. Also, the study has practical contribution to the marketers who consider or operate ingredient branding strategy to announce possible negative consequences of ingredient branding strategy when withdrawal of ingredient branding is executed. Current studies of ingredient branding strategies tend to emphasize the positive effects from the strategy, however, this study has a implication that marketers should consider ingredient branding practically because the strategy implies possible significant problem after withdrawal of ingredient branding strategy.
And lastly, the study discusses its limitations and guidelines for future studies related to the issue.