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Topic: Student Questions

Brand Fit Measurement In Brand Alliances

Posted by Anonymous on 8/12/2005 at 8:21 AM ET 225 Points
For my thesis Business Administration I'm researching the importance of "brand fit" and "product fit" for different types of brand alliances. At this moment I'm looking for a way to measure the degree of brand fit between two partners in a brand alliance. The literature states that the degree of brand fit can be measured by the number of associations that correspond between the brands. The more associations correspond the higher the degree of brand fit.

But is there perhaps a database where associations of brands are listed so that I can compare the corresponding associations between partnering firms?

A second question on this topic is whether I can use the Brand Asset Valuator to determine the number of corresponding associations?
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  • Posted by wnelson on 8/12/2005 at 10:09 AM Accepted
    I know of no such public database for brand associations. I believe your search for such a database is a lot like the search for the Holy Grail. Like the Holy Grail, many people would be able to tell you why it is so important and how magical it is, but not exactly what it is. Brand associations would be fairly specific to the product categories associated with the brands. Janiszewski, Kwee and Meyvis point this out in their 2001 paper:(https://bear.cba.ufl.edu/janiszewski/workingpapers/brand.pdf#search='brand%...). They discuss many "ingredient" brand associations like Intel and IBM, Progresso turkey rice soup and Hillshire Farms, Frito Lay and KC Masterpiece, but to build a universal data base to measure this, you'd have to include all brands and all ingredients for all products. Also, they discuss the Direct Association model (DA) in which brand names become associated with product benefits. The brand association data base would have to have brand benefits and their relative consumer strength and then all benefits you could possibly want for a brand so you could measure the resultant association between two brands.

    As far as using the Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) as a model to determine the number of associations, I believe you can use this to determine the strength of the brands you are aligning. Obviously, a brand alliance isn't going to be very good if you align two brands with little value. But, this is not the aim, as I understand it, of your thesis. You are looking at brand fit and product fit. The BAV doesn't, in my estimation, help you with associations. Just because two brands are highly differenciated, have high relevance, high esteem, and high knowledge doesn't mean they have association. For instance, I'd say Intel and Campbell's soup have high BAV - e.g. all four BAV catagories rank high - but "Intel Inside" Campbell's soup? No associations. The Intelligence Factory and Young and Rubicam have conducted BAV surveys - but these are proprietary and not public.

    I believe that, unfortunately, you may have to build your own database for associations for brand/product fit. This may take some surveying on your part.

    Hope this helps.

    Wayde
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