How Do Consumers React to Anthropomorphized Brand Alliance? Applying Interpersonal Expectations to Business-to-business Relationships

Brand alliance refers to the cooperative marketing activities between two or more brands aimed at achieving a common objective, including co-branding, co-marketing, joint branding, and jointing promotions (Rao and Ruekert 1994; Simonin and Ruth 1998). Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of brand alliances in the industrial world. However, not all brand alliances last forever. In reality, more than 50% of brand alliances are terminated within four years (Greve et al. 2010). Despite the high possibility of its early termination, to our knowledge no research in the consumer behavior literature has looked at the termination of a brand alliance, particularly its impact on consumer attitude and behavior. Previous research on branding and business-to-business relationships looked at the formation and termination of brand alliance mostly through a strategic perspective (e.g., Cui 2013; Greve et al. 2010; Lunnan and Haugland 2008), with the underlying assumption that the relationship between the allied brands should be contingent on the fair economic exchange between them (e.g., Das and Teng 2000; Gulati 1998). The present research takes the consumers’ perspective to look at this issue. Specifically, bridging research on anthropomorphism, branding, and interpersonal relationships, we investigate how brand anthropomorphism influences consumer reaction to the termination of a brand alliance. Anthropomorphism refers to individuals’ tendency to imbue humanlike features or characteristics to nonhuman entities—such as gadgets, animals, supernatural beings, or abstract concepts (Aggarwal and McGill 2007; Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007). Existing research has robustly shown that anthropomorphism elicits humanrelated knowledge structure and prompts consumers to apply these knowledge (including lay beliefs) to judge and comprehend nonhuman entities (e.g., Aggarwal and McGill 2012; Hur, Koo, and Hofmann 2015; Higgins 1997). Applying these findings to business-tobusiness relationship, we predicted that, when brands in alliance are seen as human beings, consumers are likely to use their knowledge and beliefs about person-to-person relationship to understand the relationship between the anthropomorphized brands.