Abstract:

Becoming an ingroup brand is an important approach to obtain consumer loyalty. This paper, innovatively adopting the trilateral perspective of consumers, domestic brands, and foreign brands, explores the influence of brand social categorization on consumers’ purchase of Chinese and foreign co-branded products, as well as the moderating mechanism of product fit and cultural distance. A combination of field study, laboratory experiment, and online survey has found that consumers’ purchasing intention towards Chinese-foreign co-branded products is in a descending order of joint products of domestic ingroup brand and foreign ingroup brand, joint products of domestic ingroup brand and foreign outgroup brand, and joint products of domestic outgroup brand and foreign ingroup brand. In addition, as the product fit between the co-branded brands increases and the cultural distance between the source countries decreases, the advantages of social categorization fit will increase, while the advantages of domestic ingroup brands will decrease. This paper not only fills the gap in the literature, but also provides practical guidance for domestic brands to implement cross-cultural co-branding strategies.

Key words:

co-branding of Chinese and foreign brands, brand social categorization, product fit, cultural distance

摘要：

成为消费者的内群体品牌是获得忠诚度的重要途径。创新性地采用消费者、国产品牌和他国品牌三边视角，基于社会认同理论和文化折扣理论，探索品牌社会分类对消费者购买中外联名产品的影响以及产品契合度和文化距离的调节机制。通过实地实验、实验室实验和问卷调查相结合的方法，研究发现，消费者对中外联名产品的购买倾向由高到低依次是：国产内群体和他国内群体品牌联名、国产内群体和他国外群体品牌联名、国产外群体和他国内群体品牌联名。此外，随着联名品牌间产品契合度的升高和来源国文化距离的降低，联名品牌社会分类匹配的优势将增加，国产内群体品牌的优势将减少。弥补了品牌联名相关文献中对社会分类匹配研究的不足，以及产品和品牌相关因素中对产品契合度和文化距离研究的缺失，并对国产品牌实施跨文化联名战略提供了实践指导。

关键词:

中外联名, 品牌社会分类, 产品契合度, 文化距离