Taxonomy of Brand Linkages – The Brand-relationship- Interaction (BRI) Matrix
Brands and the relationships between them are of increasing importance to practitioners and of continued significance to researchers. The environment of increased communication that continues to develop as a result of new and improved technology, together with the increasing use of brand extension, co-branding and other associative techniques and effects, is resulting in an increasingly complicated set of relationships between brands. In this paper we consider various types of brand constellations and propose a four-cell matrix based taxonomy of brand linkages as a contribution to the further understanding of this complex area.
The way that you perceive brands is a key determinant of long- term business consumer relationships (Fournier, 1998). The term “brand” has been shown to comprise meanings drawn from two distinct sources; firstly the brand identity as codified and communicated by the brand originator, and secondly the brand meanings drawn from the users or consumer environment (Jevons, Gabbott, and de Chernatony, 2001). This division of meaning between originator and consumer has a number of implications, not least the potential for ‘drift’ between organizationally determined meaning and user perceived meanings.
The drift between owner and user brand meanings is accentuated by communicative or rich environments such as the Internet, and this increases the importance of understanding the forms of linkages between brand meanings. Understanding how consumers perceive the brand is of course vital to managers. Brand associations can be represented in a number of ways; verbal, visual, other physiological senses (such as taste, smell, sound) and emotional (Supphellen, 2000).
A large proportion of consumer brand perception is obtained under low-involvement conditions and is therefore not consciously processed by the consumer’s brain (Supphellen, 2000); associations tend to be stored in terms of metaphors and, importantly, they tend to aggregate in clusters. Low and Lamb (2000, p. 360) found that “brand image, perceived quality, and brand attitude are separate and distinct dimensions of brand associations for a variety of brands and product categories, on an overall level”, although brand associations for less well-known brands tended to be more one-dimensional. Dodd and Louviere (1998) found that brand names influenced the probability of independent retailers’ listing brand extensions, but that brand names did not influence those retailers’ sensitivity to mix elements such as consumer advertising, promotional allowances and wholesale price.
We have discussed so far the meaning of a single brand. However, managers attempt to create and modify brand meaning in the eyes of consumers in a number of ways, for example through brand extensions, which are apparently increasingly popular. Murphy (1997) estimates that 95% of the 16,000 new products launched in the country every year are brand extensions, which compares with Aaker’s (1990) finding that over the period 1977-84, 120-175 totally new brands were introduced to American supermarkets annually, of which approximately 40% each year were actually brand extensions, either stocked or own brand. At its most basic, a brand extension is an attempt to link one product with another by use of a brand. The predictive value of brand names is one of the primary reasons that brand extension strategy is so pervasive; the brand name becomes more than a simple associative prompt and becomes a predictive cue (Janiszewski and van Osselaer, 2000). One of the managerial intentions of brand extension is presumably to link meaning by transferring some positive attitudes of consumers from the preexisting brand to the newly-introduced one. Although this is intended to be a one-way process, it has recently been shown (Sheinin, 2000) that after experience with a brand extension consumers changed their beliefs and attitudes about parent brands (although more so if the parent brand was unfamiliar than if it were familiar). In the context of the Internet, where brands and the linkages between them are more dynamic, managerial control becomes less predictable in the extension process, since it allows for a two- way process where the original brand can become the recipient of positive attitudes from the extended brand. This adds weight to the recommendation of accepting and building on the inevitability (de Chernatony, 2001) of decreasing managerial control of the brand in a high-communication environment such as the Internet, and shows that the link between brands is clearly a two-way process.
