Brand Collaboration Spillover on National and Store Brand Choice

This preregistered experiment examines whether exposure to a brand collaboration between a national brand and a high-quality retailer’s store brand changes consumers’ downstream brand choice in an adjacent category. The core premise is that an upstream single-brand product activates a single-brand–focused mindset that carries over to downstream decisions, whereas an upstream collaboration-brand product opens consumers’ mindset beyond the focal brand, increasing the likelihood of choosing an option outside the focal brand suite in a subsequent choice. In prior studies, we documented robust spillover effects of brand collaboration when the downstream alternative was a comparable national brand. The current study tests whether this mindset-opening effect persists when the downstream alternative is a store brand.