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Brand Alliance and
Customer-Based
Brand-Equity Effects
Judith H.Washburn
University of Tampa
Brian D.Till
Saint Louis University
Randi Priluck
Pace University
ABSTRACT
This research examines brand alliances, a specific marketing strat-
egy designed to transfer the positive brand equity of two or more
partner brands to the newly created joint brand. The study
explores how customer-based brand equity (that is, brand equity
as seen from the customer’s perspective) of partner brands affects
consumer evaluations of an alliance brand; how the brand equity
of one partner brand affects the other; how customer-based brand
equity of the partner brands affects consumers’ evaluations of the
search, experience, and credence attribute performance of the
alliance brand; and how product trial influences such evaluations.
Results suggest that merely the act of pairing with another brand
elevates consumers’ evaluations of the partner brands’ customer-
based brand equity, and high-equity partners enhance pretrial
evaluation of experience and credence attributes that are relevant
to the high-equity partner. As hypothesized, product trial moder-
ates the equity value of the alliance partner for experience attrib-
utes, and brand equity of the partner brands influences consumer
perceptions of the alliance brand’s equity. © 2004 Wiley Periodi-
cals, Inc.
Psychology &Marketing,Vol. 21(7): 487–508 (July 2004)
Published online inWiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)
© 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20016

Customer-based brand equity1and its effect on consumption behavior
has become a widely discussed area of marketing.Throughout the 1980s
theoretical research centered on measuring a brand’s equity with the
use of a variety of financial (Farquhar & Ijiri,1993;Simon & Sullivan,
1990;Swait,Erdem,Louviere,& Dubelaar,1993) and customer-based
techniques (Green & Srinivasen,1990;MacLachlan &...