Abstract
Anchoring refers to a biased judgment on a stimulus based on the initial assessment of another stimulus and the insufficient adjustment away from that initial assessment. Previous research indicates that anchoring seems to be a general phenomenon, underlying a wide variety of processing strategies (Epley and Gilovich 2001; Johnson and Puto 1987; Tversky and Kahnemann 1974). Every time when individuals form an impression or an image about a stimulus while another stimulus is present, these impressions may be subject to anchoring effects.
Consumers regularly form images about brands and compare brands to other brands. We therefore propose that there will be an anchoring effect in image impressions about brands — a phenomenon that we will refer as "the brand anchoring effect." The brand anchoring effect can be investigated, for example, in the context of co-branded identities (e.g., cellular phones offered by the brand alliance Sony Ericsson). We propose that in these co-branding cases, one constituent stimulus (Sony or Ericsson) may serve as an anchor and affect the image structure of the co-branded identity (Sony Ericsson) as a whole. We test the brand anchoring effect in three studies, identifying characteristics of the co-branded entities that lead to one of the constituent entities to become the anchor. We derive our hypotheses on the basis of the Selective Activation, Reconstruction, and Anchoring (SARA) model (Pohl, Eisenhauer, and Hardt 2003), which is specifically designed to explain anchoring effects, and the customer-based brand equity model (Keller 1993, 2003).