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Abstract
Brand extensions as a vehicle for growth have facilitated fashion brands penetration of new markets with lower marketing expenditures. Although brand and retailer collaboration is important in introducing newly extended brand products in the markets, the effect of their collaboration on consumers evaluations of brand extensions has not yet being investigated. To bridge this gap in brand extension literature, this study aimed to provide a better understanding of brand and retailer collaborations based on the means-end theoretical perspective. Thus, this study investigated how consumers evaluate brand extensions when a brand collaborates with a retailer, and how their evaluations influence consumers perceived value of the brand and retailer collaborations. Two types of brand and retailer collaboration cases were investigated with a total of 429 samples, and the hypothesized model was tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. Consistent with prior brand extension research, the findings of this study imply that perceived fit between brand and retailer has a significant impact on consumers attitudes and evaluations of brand extensions. However, slightly different from previous studies, the results also indicate that the perceived fit between brand and retailer may have different impacts on brands and retailers. Specifically, the results indicate that the perceived image fit influences attitudinal change toward the brand but not attitudinal change toward the retailer in both vertical-downward and vertical-upward extensions. Moreover, these attitudinal changes toward the brand and the retailer have significant relationships with vertical brand extensions when the retailers collaborate with the brands. Additionally, the results suggest that brand extension evaluations significantly influence consumers perceived value when they consider purchasing extended brand products sold by the retailer. These findings of this study contribute to the mean-end theory by extending the means-end model with cognitive and affective consequences and by providing empirical evidence supporting the model in the investigation of the effect of brand and retailer collaboration on consumers evaluations of brand extensions.