The Impacts of Brand Cohesiveness and Similarity in Feedback Extension Effects

Extant brand research has discussed the feedback effects of brand extensions from the three major perspectives of the characteristics of extensions, the characteristics of brands, and the characteristics of perceivers. The first stream specifically discusses the extension characteristics of accessibility-diagnosticity, similarity, valence, and leveraging strategies. The second stream examines the brand characteristic of quality variability. The third stream examines the perceiver characteristics of cultural orientation, implicit personality theory, motivation level, need of cognition, processing style, self-construal, and self-regulatory focus. In comparison, findings of the first and third streams have been fruitful, while less is known about the influences of brand characteristics. Therefore, this research advances feedback extension research by examining the moderating effects of brand characteristics, specifically in the perspectives of brand similarity and cohesiveness.

Recent social cognition research has paid considerable attention to the influence of group entitativity on group perception. Entitativity refers to the wholeness of a group, or the degree to which a social aggregate is perceived as “having the nature of an entity,” and is characterized by proximity, similarity, and common fate. A high-entitative group is a collection of people bonded together in a coherent unit, such as task (e.g., airline flight crews) or intimacy (e.g., members of a family) groups. Extant research documents that the transference of group members’ behavioral traits is more salient in high-entitative groups consisting of similar and cohesive group members. The results imply that perceived entitativity moderates group perception, and the group members of high-entitative groups exert more influence on group impression formation. As with social groups, we argue that perceived entitativity moderates brand evaluation, and the brand extensions of high-entitative brands exert more influence on brand evaluations. As brand failure is more critical for brand management, we specifically examined the negative effects of unfavorable brand extensions on the evaluations of entitative brands. Capitalizing on the perceived entitativity theory, we propose that negative extension information instigates more salient impacts on high-entitative brands consisting of similar- or dissimilar-cohesive brand extensions.

The hypotheses were examined with a three-group between-subjects experimental design consisting of similar-cohesive, dissimilar-cohesive, and dissimilar-incohesive conditions. The results indicate that similar-cohesive and dissimilar-incohesive brands are perceived as high- and low-entitative brands and are more favorably and unfavorably evaluated, respectively. Moreover, brands with dissimilar extensions are perceived as high-entitative brands if the dissimilar extensions are perceived as cohesive. However, while perceived as high-entitative brands, the dissimilar-cohesive brands are not more favorably evaluated like the similar-cohesive brands do because the negative effect of brand dissimilarity counterbalances the positive effect of brand cohesiveness on brand evaluations. Moreover, negative extension information instigates more negative impacts on high- (vs. low-) entitative brands, including similar- and dissimilar-cohesive brands. The results parallel the findings of social group perception.