The evidence of dual conflict in the evaluation of brand extension: An event-related potential study

Abstract

Brand extension is one of the central issues in marketing research. The current study employs event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the electrophysiological process when subjects make a decision to accept or reject a brand extension composed of two words (W1W2). W1 is always a beverage brand name, and W2 a product name among three product categories: household appliance product (extension type BH), snack product (BS), and beverage product (BB). The behavior and ERPs data showed that subjects found it easy to accept the brand extension in the BB condition, medium in the BS and hard in the BH situation. The negative slow waves in different cortexes suggested that there are two cognitive conflict processes in evaluating a brand extension in the W1W2 paradigm: the conflict between W1 and W2, and the conflict between the whole information of W1W2 and the information retrieved from memory about the products under the brand name in W1.