Managing Sports Brands in a Global Consumer Market: Country-of-Origin Fit in Cross-Border Strategic Brand Alliances

The goal of this paper was to examine the effects of cross-border strategic brand alliances (SBAs) between host brands and partner brands on the evaluation of the consumer product. Two experimental studies using a series of 2 (Low vs. High COO fit) × 2 (Pre- vs. Post-attitudes) mixed factorial designs were conducted to understand the effect of Country-of-Origin (COO) fit on attitudes toward the host and partner brands. Data from a total of 244 college students were analysed using repeated measure ANOVAs and simple main effect analysis. The results of the first study revealed that high COO fit did not produce positive post-attitude changes toward the host brand. On the other hand, low COO fit generated negative post-attitude changes toward the host brand when the host brand allied with another brand with an unfavourable country image. The results of the second study also support the findings of the first study in that attitude changes toward the partner brand were significantly affected by the level of COO fit. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Keywords: Cross-border strategic brand alliance; Country-of-origin fit; Product/brand fit