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1. Introduction
Brand alliances are the short- or long-term combination of at least two brands for joint corporate activities (Gammoh et al., 2010). A popular long-term brand alliance strategy is co-branding, in which one product is branded and identified simultaneously with at least two brands (Helmig et al., 2008). In recent years, co-branding has gained increasing popularity for leveraging brands worldwide (Besharat and Langan, 2014) and has been applied in various industries, such as consumer goods (Philadelphia-Milka spread), high technology (e.g. Apple Watch, co-branded with Hermès) and services (e.g. MasterCard by BMW). Moreover, H&M has started a variety of co-branding activities with designer luxury brands in the field of fast fashion, such as Alexander Wang (Shen et al., 2017).
At the same time, co-branding has evoked a wide range of academic research activities (Cunha et al., 2015; Huertas-García et al., 2017; Mishra et al., 2017). While one research stream examines the potential benefits of co-branding activities (Park et al., 1996; Washburn et al., 2000, 2004), other streams focus on how to select the right partner for a (co-)brand alliance (Lee and Decker, 2016; Van der Lans et al., 2014) and empirically explore how consumers evaluate co-branded products (Besharat, 2010; Bouten et al., 2011). However, the findings still remain fragmented (Besharat and Langan, 2014).
For example, only little is known about how exactly consumers form their perceptions regarding a new co-brand. As marketers use co-branding in an attempt to transfer positive associations of the parent brands to the newly formed co-brand (Washburn et al., 2000, 2004), this lack of knowledge prompts the question what influence the perceptions of parent brands exactly have on the perception of this co-brand. This question is particularly important for both research and practice because the resulting perception of a co-brand itself may have an effect on the parent brands’ perceptions, which is called spillover effect in literature (Helmig et al., 2008). Additionally, this question should be addressed especially in the case when two well-known and established brands are combined to form a new co-brand. Regarding these two brands, consumers have salient brand associations in mind that may be transferred to the co-brand as well as to the partnering brand...