Apple and Mercedes or Apple and Hyundai? Why Some Brand Alliances Make More Sense Than Others

[Sponsored article] Brand alliances bring together two or more brands in joint marketing events that in theory should benefit all participants. But the science behind which brand alliances make the best “fit” has been weak, complicated by the difficulty in collecting data and determining the best measures. The reason is that brands are strategically combined into alliances, which makes investigation challenging. Now, a group of researchers has addressed the gap by creating a model that lets them measure consumer ratings of real brands, as well as their favourability in different combinations.

The study by Ralf van der Lans, Bram Van den Bergh and Evelien Dieleman explains the different responses to brand alliances and tests them, even when on the surface these alliances can sometimes seem perplexing.

“Why is Red Bull teaming up with a somewhat dissimilar brand, Nissan’s Infinity, on a Formula One race car, rather than Ferrari, which has a more similar brand image? Or why is the Qatar Foundation sponsoring F.C. Barcelona’s soccer shirt alongside UNICEF, rather than displaying its logo next to Emirates’ on Real Madrid’s shirt?” they said.

“We wanted to show that the conceptual coherence between brand personality profiles is a strong predictor of brand alliance evaluations.”

Brand personality has been studied under other conditions and relates to human-like characteristics that consumers frequently attribute to brands. Five dimensions in particular have been singled out: sincerity, competence, excitement, sophistication and ruggedness. The authors refine these categories further into two types: intrinsic dimensions which correspond more closely to human personality dimensions and here include sincerity, competence and excitement; and extrinsic dimensions, which are more related to sociodemographic features rather than personality and here include sophistication and ruggedness.

The authors hypothesise that brand alliances will be more favourably evaluated if they are somewhat dissimilar on intrinsic dimensions and similar on extrinsic ones – much like a romantic couple may be better suited if they come from similar backgrounds but have somewhat dissimilar personality traits.

They test this by having 100 brands evaluated for their brand personality on the five dimensions by 204 participants (each was presented with 10 brands). Another group of 201 participants then evaluated 1,206 brand alliances involving those 100, which they were told were jointly sponsoring an event (each participant was presented with six alliances). The results largely upheld the hypotheses with some modifications.