Abstract
In today’s business world where the competition between brands is fierce and the
resources to meet consumer demands are finite, firms are realising the importance of
collaborating with other brands to maximise brand potential. Although a properly executed
alliance of two brands can be a strategic business development tool, the process is
challenging and failures are common in practice. The growing literature on brand alliance
would benefit from a consensus on the factors that drive success, and a further exploration of
the strategy’s opportunities and risks.
The overarching aim of this PhD thesis is to advance understanding of the brand
alliance strategy by delving into three aspects of it: its success drivers, how firms can capture
its opportunities, and how they might avoid its risks. This aim is addressed through three
papers, which are integrated and build on each other. In the first paper, a meta-analysis is
performed to aggregate and synthesise the success drivers of a brand alliance. In the second
paper, both field and scenario-based online experiments are conducted to uncover the benefits
of an alliance strategy in a service business. In the third paper, a scenario-based experiment is
conducted to examine the effectiveness of different crisis response strategies on the retention
of brand equity in an alliance context.
The thesis contributes to the literature on brand alliance in three ways: (1) aggregating
knowledge and achieving consensus as to the relative importance of various success factors;
(2) investigating the applicability of an alliance strategy to a service business, thereby
overcoming the challenges of intangibility; and (3) unfolding the possible risks that are
associated with an alliance and addressing how brands can effectively respond to and
mitigate them. This thesis therefore advances understanding of the brand alliance strategy. It
offers managers insights into how they might benefit from adopting the strategy as a strategic
business development tool and informs them on how to mitigate the possible risks. Finally, it
outlines an agenda for future research.