Survey of the Impacts of Purchase Involvement on Acceptance of Brand Extensions in High and Low Products

With increasing competition in today’s markets, the vital point for companies is to maintain their market shares. Therefore, marketers try to vitalize the companies’ brands, in order to maintain their position in market. Whereas, creation a new brand is very costly and time consuming and its chance of success is limited, nowadays, more than ever, marketers are trying to achieve their goals through brand extension strategy. But, the point which is usually ignored in most researches in this field is that the researchers have not focused on differentiation between different products in analysis of brand extension acceptance. In this descriptive survey, the data has been collected by a self-administrated questionnaire. Validity and reliability of the questionnaire was ascertained with the help of content validity and Cronbach's Alpha respectively. Sampling method of this study was proportional stratified sampling. 420 questionnaires have been randomly distributed among those people present in the chain stores in Tehran and all of them were collected. Finally, 391 questionnaires were suitable to be used for statistic analysis. Research findings indicate, among others, that: *Consumers transfer purchase involvement factors (“previous experience”, “interest”, risk acceptance”, “situation”, “price”, and “social visibility”) from a product with parent brand to the product in a new category with extended brand, in both high and low involvement situation; *Perceived quality is transferred from a product with parent brand to a product in a new category with extended brand, only in low involvement situation.