Limitations and future research

In this study the consumers’ environmental involvement, as well as fit and brand extension strategy, did not have the expected impact on parent brand evaluation. There are a few limitations to this study that could explain why all the hypotheses were found to be insignificant. The limitations will be presented in the form of a critical review, followed by future research proposals.

The first limitation that rests on this research is the sampling method. The convenience sampling method is used, resulting in a sample that had an excessive age category of 18–24-year old’s (N = 71), as opposed to the other age groups within this sample. Moreover, 55.0%

of the respondents were in possession of a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree. Besides the normality tests that were conducted on this sample, future research should examine potential differences in outcomes by making use of a sample that is larger with more diverse characteristics of respondents.

Moreover, one possible explanation for H1's insignificant result is that the research sample did not find the fast fashion industry interesting enough to evaluate the parent brand lower, based on the existing line, and higher, based on the green line extension. This way the parent brand was not evaluated differently, based on the used brand extension strategy. The purpose of the environmental involvement question was to determine a respondent's level of environmental concern. However, environmental involvement is not a prerequisite for consumers' interest in fast-fashion industries. Consumers who care about the environment, for example, may be much more concerned about the food and meat industry than they are about the fashion industry. This may have resulted in slightly more neutral responses from respondents, resulting in the differences between the two categories remaining off. Therefore, for future research, it would be interesting to measure the interest in this specific environmental

sustainability topic of fast fashion, besides the environmental involvement, to see if these forms of environmental interest significantly differ.

Furthermore, the insignificant outcomes of H1 and H2 could also be explained by the idea that the stimuli did not influence the sample as much as was expected. The manipulated stimuli for the brand extension strategy and fit were created from scratch for a non-existent brand. When examining the previous studies more closely, it is discovered that the experimental settings used differed: the manipulations were tested on well-known real-life brands such as Polaroid (Milberg et al., 1997) and Levi’s (Sheinin, 1998), whereas this study made use of a fictitious brand. The main point of choosing a fictitious brand is that it controls for the potential bias resulting from previous associations with the brand. Previous associations or opinions about a brand can diminish the influence of the manipulated stimuli on the consumer, which weakens the measurement of a potential effect (Dacin & Smith, 1994; Keller

& Aaker, 1992). However, the existing associations of a well-known brand may have resulted in more extreme responses when evaluating brands, potentially resulting in significant differences between the conditions.

Besides, since respondents had a minimum of 30 seconds to form an opinion about the fictitious brand, based on an introduction text and an advertisement, it might have been too short or abstract for them to form an actual opinion about this brand. The fictitious brand's association may have been too weak, resulting in more neutral responses in the conditions and insignificant results (Petty et al., 1983). This could be an explanation of why fewer extreme opinions about the fictious brand were handed in and more neutral evaluation scores were derived. Regardless of the pre-tests that were conducted to see if the constructed stimuli were perceived as intended by the research, these stimuli might have had an effect that was too weak to examine differences between the conditions when the stimuli were used separately in the

actual survey. Therefore, it would be interesting to examine this effect by making use of an existing brand with strong associations to see potential differences in evaluation outcomes.

Lastly, the non-significant finding of H3 can be explained by the idea of socially desirable answers. Questions regarding consumers’ own level of environmental involvement elicit a form of social desirability (Roxas & Lindsay, 2011). Regardless of the introduction text of the survey, in which it was mentioned all respondents’ answers were anonymously retrained, the socially desirable answers could have had an impact by which the effect of this moderator to compose significant differences remained off. This potential social responsibility bias is also reflected in the mean score of environmental involvement of the sample, which was 5.76, on a 7-point Likert scale, where 1 is the lowest score and 7 is the highest score. In the low-involved condition, the standard deviation was subtracted from the mean score, and in the high-involved condition, the standard deviation was added to the mean score. The lack of actual low-environmentally involved respondents who scored below 4 on this Likert scale could have thrown off the significant differences between the conditions of the fit and the parent brand evaluation. For future research I recommend making use of filters in the data retrieving process so that the consumers’ environmental involvement is equally distributed among a low condition (scores below 4) and a high condition (scores above 4). Besides, since the additional analyses for the age of 35 years and older showed direct effects on the parent brand evaluation, this variable should be examined in more detail in future research as well.

Nonetheless, two other (marginally) significant outcomes were discovered for which no hypotheses were developed. A logical explanation of the significant stand-alone effect of environmental involvement on parent brand evaluation could be that environmentally concerned consumers perceive the fashion industry itself as something that is damaging the world, regardless of the fit or brand extension strategy, as the clothing industry remains one of the most damaging industries in the world (Fletcher, 2014). Therefore, the parent brand is

evaluated more negatively if the level of environmental involvement of consumers increases.

Regardless of the insignificant model fit, it would be interesting to investigate how this predictor variable directly influences parent brand evaluation in future research rather than using it as a moderator variable.

Furthermore, there is a marginally significant relationship found between environmental involvement and fit on parent brand evaluation. This effect may indicate a dual effect of fit and environmental involvement on parent brand evaluation. Due to its marginal significant character, more research is needed to examine this effect in more detail to see to what extent these two variables could significantly have an impact on the parent brand evaluation.

To summarize, more research is needed to gain a better understanding of the success of green brand extensions. The goal of this study was to determine the boundary conditions for positive parent brand evaluations which would be a consequence of a successful green brand extension. Although no significant differences were found for the proposed hypotheses, the additional findings indicate that this research has laid the groundwork for future research on green brand extension success determinants.