Ingredient Branding as a Brand Building Instrument

The use of co-branded ingredients has become a popular means of improving customer response to brand extensions. Research in this area has however been limited to the host brand s perspective. The present study shifts the focus to the ingredient brand s perspective. The author develops a framework to examine how ingredient brands are affected when featuring co-branded extensions. The experimental results confirm that exposure to co-branded extensions alters custo-mer perceptions of the ingredient brand. Both the ingredient brand s attribute associations and its perceived skilfulness in the extension category are enhanced. Furthermore, the results indicate that co-branding of extensions positively affects evaluations of other host brands subsequently introduced products featuring the same ingre-dient brand.