How Brands Shape Newness Perceptions

To be successful, innovations should be perceived as novel and different from existing alternatives (Gatignon and Xuereb 1997, Henard and Szymanski 2001). The handful of studies that explored the antecedents of novelty focused on either firm characteristics and new product development strategies (Sethi et al. 2012; Sethi et al. 2001) or consumer categorization processes (Selinger et al. 2006). With respect to launching new products, research shows the merits and increasing popularity of introducing products as brand extensions (e.g., Aaker and Keller 1990; Broniarczyk and Alba 1994; Stahl et al. 2012). For innovations introduced as extensions, an element that may heavily determine extension newness perceptions, is the brand used to introduce it. In this research, we explore the impact of parent brand typicality on extension newness perceptions. The strong category anchoring of long-established, typical brands like Jeep has been shown to create a unique advantage relative to other brands (Carpenter and Nakamoto 1989). However, it has also been argued to present a possible innovation disadvantage (Aaker and Keller 1990; Farquhar et al. 1992), as it intuitively may make people think inside the box. Yet, we counter-intuitively predict that brand typicality may help rather than hinder novelty perceptions.