Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Brand alliances are popular in the marketplace as far as they are used as:
- a strategy of signalling unobservable product quality and providing information about attributes available in a product ([55] Rao and Ruekert, 1994; [56] Rao et al. , 1999; [60] Simonin and Ruth, 1998);
- reaching untapped market segments ([57] Rodrigue and Biswas, 2004);
- introducing new products ([58] Samu et al. , 1999); and
- as an alternative brand extension strategy ([54] Park et al. , 1996).
However, despite the prevalence of such cooperative ventures between brands, along with the strong academic interest in alliance relationships in marketing and business ([10] Bucklin and Sengupta, 1993), no attention has been paid to examine brand alliances as a mechanism of building online brands. From both a managerial and academic perspectives this is an issue that still deserves serious empirical scrutiny ([59] Shankar et al. , 2002).
Given that new and relatively unknown e-brands suffer substantial difficulties to persuade consumers to engage in online transactions ([25] Grabner-Kräuter and Kaluscha, 2003; [47] McKnight et al. , 2002; [70] Wang et al. , 2004), the rationale behind the use of brand alliances as a mechanism to overcome these difficulties is clear. First, the premise of brand alliances is that brands are valuable assets that may be combined with others to form a synergistic alliance to convince consumers that a double signature on the offer represents increased value ([55] Rao and Ruekert, 1994). Second, the network nature of the electronic medium makes easier for brands to be oriented toward collaborations for market access, reputation endorsement or mutual benefit ([12] Chatterjee, 2002; [15] Davis et al. , 2000; [40] Leuthesser et al. , 2003).
Being so, we contribute to this growing body of research by investigating the consequences of brand alliances' evaluations on an unknown online brand.
After positioning our research in light of the literature on brand alliances, we use theories of Information Integration and Attitude Accessibility and Signalling and Asymmetric Information research to provide a foundation for proposing and then testing a model of brand alliances' evaluations and their effects on the primary brand (i.e. the online unknown brand) participating in that associations. Subsequently, we describe the methodology conducted to test the hypotheses and analyze...