The Research On Influencing Factors Of Internet Financial Brand Extension

With the rapid growth of internet finance, brand extension has becoming the important strategy for internet financial enterprises developing their market. Then, brand extension in the context of internet finance has attracted increasing scholarly attention in the past few years. The research of brand extension at this stage mainly focused on offline products field, the relevant research of brand extension for internet product is relatively few, and they mostly refer to these conclusions got from offline product field. In fact, these conclusions may not able to be applied to internet financial context directly.By considering both the traditional brand extension factors and internet financial context, the current study builds the internet financial brand extension theoretical model based on the A&K model, Theory of Planed Behavior (TPB) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Then we test our model using the Alipay's extension to YuE Bao and CunJin Bao to find the key factors and the mechanism influencing internet financial brand extension. The results indicate that the attitude of parent brand can be transferred to its extended products, and positively influences the brand extension evaluation. In addition, both the brand trust and the perceived fit between the parent brand and the extension product positively influence brand extension evaluation. In the context of internet finance, the perceived tie positively influences brand extension evaluation, and the attitude of parent brand positively influences the brand trust, perceived fit and perceived tie.This study successfully applies the Classification Theory, Halo Effect Theory and Risk Perception Theory to reasonablely interpretate the mechanism influencing brand extension, and expands the research object of brand extension to the internet financial industry. The results provide some implications for promoting internet financial product and provide a new perspective for the internet financial research. Also, this study provides a new perspective from brand theory for the research of technology acceptance. And compared with previous technology acceptance studies, which only focus on a single technology products, this study successfully applies the technology acceptance model to explain the transfer of the user's willingness to accept for two different products.