Rebranding: Two Essays

Richie Lin Liu

This dissertation extends the limited extant research on rebranding. Despite the high costs and influential marketplace implications associated with rebranding, brand research has largely ignored this brand strategy and consumer responses. To expand our understanding of rebranding, I first provide an overview of rebranding in the marketplace and review existing rebranding research. I then report two essays that examine rebranding from different perspectives. Essay 1 draws on the associative network memory model, consumers' brand identification, and conceptual fluency in developing the framework for consumer responses to brand logo change. Overall, my experimental studies demonstrate consumers' unfavorable responses to brand logo change, especially for participants with high brand identification. I also establish state brand identification as a mediator for the impact of a brand logo change on consumer responses. Lastly, subsequent experiments indicate exposing consumers to previous brand logos can improve unfavorable responses to brand logo change due to an increase in ease of processing the meaning of the change. Essay 2 examines sales employees' responses to rebranding using a survey methodology with technical sales personnel from a Fortune 100 company in the telecommunications industry. I extend recent work on sales employees and brands into rebranding research to develop and test a model that theoretically links perceived rebranding intensity (i.e., degree) to sales employees' challenge oriented motivation and performance (i.e., sales generated and outcome performance). In addition, brand and organizational identification are included in my model due to the nature of the perceived rebranding intensity effect depending on sales employees' different types of identifications. Results indicate that sales employees with high (vs. low) brand identification have lower (vs. higher) challenge oriented motivation as perceived rebranding intensity increases, whereas organizational identification reveals an opposite moderating effect. My findings are attributed to the differing nature between the extent sales employees define their identity with a brand and the perceived overlap sales employees have with their firm.

Rebranding: Two Essays

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