Brands affect slogans affect brands? Competitive interference, brand equity and the brand-slogan link

Abstract

Brand slogans have been subject to much interest from both practitioners and researchers, the reason being that slogans may have positive effects on their brands. Previous research has mainly focused on the slogan effects when the brand is given (for example, in controlled experiments).

Based on the fact that most brands face severe competitive interference, this paper tests the effects of correct and incorrect brand-slogan attribution on both slogan and brand evaluations in an empirical study. The results show that slogans may work as carriers of brand equity. Slogan learning is biased by the brand's equity so that slogans for strong brands are generally better liked than slogans for weak brands; however, by way of competitive interference, this equity may be incorrectly attributed to a competing brand. The authors investigate how the brand-slogan link differs between weak and strong brands and provide indications of how to avoid the negative effects and capitalise on the positive effects of competitive interference.