Riding Coattails: When Co-branding Helps versus Hurts Less-known Brands

New brands often partner with established brands to leverage existing associations. Conventional wisdom holds that such partnerships disproportionately benefit the less-known (Aaker and Keller 1990; Boush and Loken 1991; Broniarczyk and Alba 1994; Levin and Levin 2000). A popular account for this is the Human Associative Memory (HAM) model, according to which an unknown brand is relatively devoid of associational content and is therefore a blank slate ready to receive the presumably positive associations from an established brand. Although there is intuitive appeal to this account, the HAM model presumes a static association between entities in which the consumer need only learn that the two brands are partnering together. Most consumer exposures to co-branding, however, are much more dynamic since the consumer learns not only of the existence of a partnership, but also of expected product benefits stemming from the partnership. When these dynamic effects are incorporated, research on consumer associative learning has found that the transfer of associations can deviate from the predictions of the HAM model.