IIM Indore seeks to be a contextually-relevant business school with world-class academic standards that develops socially-conscious managers, leaders and entrepreneurs. IIM Indore is committed to: Excellence in management education, research, and training, Use of contemporary participant-centric pedagogies and teaching methods, A presence in emerging segments of management education.

IIM Indore

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the influences of parent brand characteristics and brand-extension fit on attitude towards the extension in the context of services-to-goods (SG) brand extension compared with services-to-services (SS) brand extension.Design/methodology/approachA survey design was used to collect data from 626 individual respondents. The respondents were selected using probability sampling from two cities in India. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).FindingsThe study indicated that context (SS or SG) moderated the influence of factors on attitude toward brand extension. A favorable attitude towards the parent brand had a greater positive influence on SS brand extension compared with SG brand extension. Quality variance among service types under the parent brand had a higher negative impact on attitude towards SG brand extension than on attitude towards SS brand extension.Practical implicationsManagers may prefer extending a service brand to another service rather than a good when consumers have a favorable attitude towards the brand. Furthermore, when the perceived quality of service types under a service brand varies substantially, extension of the brand to a good requires greater concern than extension to a service.Originality/valueThe unique contribution of this study is the examination of the moderating influence of the characteristics of an offering (SS vis-à-vis SG) on the link between brand extension attitude and its influencing factors.

Marketing

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Marketing Intelligence & Planning

Comparing consumer evaluations of services-to-services brand extensions with services-to-goods

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the idea of egoism in the context of marketing. The idea of egoism is reviewed and contextualized into a framework for interpreting different marketer types. Marketers’ potential trade-offs with consumers and competitors are examined. Four types of marketers are explicated: extremely egoistic marketer, moderately egoistic marketer, moderately altruistic marketer, and extremely altruistic marketer. The framework offered in the paper is of relevance to marketers, media, and agencies rewarding marketing performance. The framework may help in assessing the ethical quotient in marketers’ preferences and behaviors. Studies recognizing the pertinence of egoism in marketing are scarce, and the typological framework discussed in the paper is a contribution to the marketing ethics literature.

Humanities and Social Sciences

Journal of Business Ethics

Are Marketers Egoists? A Typological Explication

Studies in literature on consumer attitude toward the brand extension, and revision of attitude toward parent brand have focused on the influence of a variety of factors concerning parent brand, fit between the parent brand and extension, extension product category and consumer characteristics. In all such studies, the brand that is extended and the extension product category are both either goods-intensive offerings (GG brand extension) or services-intensive offerings (SS brand extension), and researchers have observed paucity of studies on brand extension from goods-intensive offerings to services-intensive offerings (GS brand extension), and services-intensive offerings to goods-intensive offerings (SG brand extension). In this study, the influence of factors concerning parent brand and fit between the parent brand and extension are contrasted between GG and GS brand extensions. Using survey design, data was collected from individual consumers recruited from households in two Indian cities, and analysis of the data was performed using a structural equation modeling approach. The findings from this study suggest that brand extensions from goods to goods is preferable to brand extensions from goods to services under some conditions, such as when quality variance across brand portfolio is high and when product category fit is present.

Journal of Brand Management

Consumer evaluation of brand extensions: Comparing goods to goods brand extensions with goods to services

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to help marketing scholars view virtual worlds as new product–markets and trigger serious investigations on consumer evaluation of brand extensions when a brand is extended from the real world to a virtual world and vice versa.Design/methodology/approachThe paper makes an extensive review of studies on virtual world. Further, it amalgamates understanding from well-established literature on consumer evaluation of brand extensions into the emerging virtual world understanding to conceptualize moderating influence of contexts – the real world context and a virtual world context – on how consumers evaluate brand extensions.FindingsThrough logical arguments supported by existing literature, the paper provides 14 well-conceptualized propositions that argue that the real world and virtual world contexts moderate the well-established relationships in brand extension literature. It broadly proposes that the relationships between the consumer evaluations of brand extension and its known determinants are stronger in case of within-the-world extensions and weaker in case of across-the-world extensions.Researchlimitations/implications The paper introduces to the marketing scholars an entirely new area of enquiry as it challenges the known brand extension knowledge when a brand is extended across the worlds.Practical implicationsMarketers considering launching new offerings across the contexts of real or virtual world would have implications on whether to extend the brand or not.Originality/valueVirtual worlds have largely been construed in marketing literature as fictional worlds. There is not much explored in terms of virtual worlds as new product–markets. The study offers unique value in conceptualizing differences among within-the-world brand extensions and across-the-world brand extensions.