Consumer Perspectives of Brand Extension Effects : Information Analysis Determining the Consumer Behaviour Patterns

Brands are successful because people prefer them to ordinary products. In addition to the psychological factors already mentioned, brands give consumers the means whereby they can make choices and judgments. The secret to successful branding is to influence the decisions the way in which consumers perceive the company or product, and brands can affect the minds of customers by appealing to the information acquired and analyzed. This paper attempts to emphasize the relationship between empirical and theoretical considerations in the information analysis of brand extensions on consumer behavior. Broadly the study focuses on analysis at the individual or micro-level and tries to draw implications towards buying decisions on the extended brands analyzing the aggregate relationships. The discussion analyzes categorical similarity as a determinant of diagnostic behaviour and explore the premise that high accessibility of extension information in some of the past studies may have left little room to observe the effects of diagnostic behaviour.