The Transfer Mechanism Of The Co-brand Personalities

Brand management has become an important part of the field of marketing and branding research, especially in recent decades the issue of the brand personality has been widely studied. Brand personality is the concept that used human's personality characteristics to representative the brand's characteristics. It is one of the cores and the most active part of brand image, which can express consumers'interests and self-concept.Previous brand personality researches focused on the formation, measurement, and personality dimensions of brand personality, as well as the interaction between brand and consumer in competition situation. However, new brands form, co-brand, become a hot topic. Researches on co-brand personalities are still a blank so far. This study aims to explore the brand personality in combined situation, to find the transfer mechanism of the co-brand personalities.This study includes three parts. The first part examines the transfer mechanism of the co-brand personalities; the second part examines the role of self-complexity in influencing consumer responses to co-brands with trait associations to two distinct brand personality dimensions versus one distinct brand personality dimension; the third part examines the influence to the parent brands of co-brand. The results indicate:1. Focusing on low-involved products, consumers will transfer the positive perception of the parent brand personalities directly to its co-brand, the fitness of parent brands'personalities has positive effect on co-brand personalities; whereas, when focusing on high-involved products, consumers will transfer the positive perception of the parent brand personalities to its co-brand when co-brand'categories fit parent brands', the fitness of parent brands'personalities also has positive effect on co-brand personalities.2. Consumers when choose high-self-concept products prefer co-brand with two distinct brand personality dimensions, the congruence of consumer complex self- concept and brand personality has positive effect on consumer brand preference; whereas, it cannot influence low-self-concept produces'chosen.3. The unfitness of parent brands and co-brand has positive effect on powerful parent brand; and both the fitness and the unfitness of parent brands and co-brand have positive effects on weak parent brand.