Consumer attitudes toward digital co-branding activities

Co-branding has been a popular and trending topic among marketing researchers for a long time. With the growth of digital platforms opening new channels for brands to collaborate and offering exciting opportunities, digital co-branding has emerged as an effective practice where two brands join forces to deliver more value to customers than they could alone. This thesis explores the factors that affect consumer attitudes toward such digital co-branding practices and provides a deeper understanding of how various factors shape consumer attitudes in the digital world. One of the main objectives of the study is to understand how consumer attitudes toward digital co-branding can be measured in different ways. For this purpose, taking consumer attitude as the central construct, alternative measures of this construct have been used as dependent variables in the study model, namely, consumer attitude in general, context-specific, hedonic and utilitarian aspects of attitude. Unlike prior research focusing solely on general attitudes, this work reveals how consumers distinctly assess: general attitude, context-specific attitude, hedonic attitude and utilitarian attitude. Brand Equity, Brand Fit, Product Fit, and Social Influence are the independent variables in this thesis. Among the key findings, the results reveal that brand equity most strongly influences hedonic attitude, while Social Influence is the most important driver of context-specific attitude. These attitude types showed significantly different driver patterns, proving the necessity of separate measurement for accurate insights.