The Malleable Brand: The Role of Implicit Theories in Evaluating Brand Extensions

This research documents how implicit theories regarding personality traits (whether they are deemed to be fixed or malleable) affect consumer inferences about the malleability of a brand's personality traits and, thus, its ability to extend into new categories. Study 1 documents that consumers who believe that traits are malleable (incremental theorists) are more accepting of brand extensions than consumers who believe that traits are fixed...