Da Won Lee

MA Fashion Retail

I have several years of experience in South Korean fashion retail industry as a fashion buyer and designer with BA Fashion Design background. I decided to study here to personally experience innovative global retailers and to help domestic ones develop with academic analysis of their current market status. For the past two years, I have found Korean department stores were growing fast by branding and segmenting themselves as manufacturer brands to meet different groups of consumers, especially young adults. Thus, my interest led to the idea of my dissertation by conceptualising this phenomenon and examining relations with their brand portfolio. Title: An Exploratory Study of Feedback Effects of Retail Brand Extensions on Retail Brand Image: Focusing on 18 to 25-year-old Consumers’ Responses toward Downscale Extensions of South Korean Department Stores With the trend of retailers as brands, some retail brands downwardly extend into sub-brands just like product brands. Unlike previous studies focusing on product brands, this research explored how retailers’ downscale vertical line extensions have the feedback effects on retail brand image, with multiple variables including retail brand image (functional/affective/store/service), extension attitudes and image fit. Following positivism, multiple case studies of Lotte and Hyundai were conducted to obtain industrial perspectives of retail brand extensions strategies. Lotte Department Store that was ranked third on Forbes’ 2013 biggest global department stores launched Lotte Young Plaza in 2003, whereas Hyundai Department Store that is a retail business of Hyundai Group well-known for Hyundai Motor launched Hyundai U-Plex in 2009. For consumers’ perspectives, sequential mixed methods were adopted from 239 questionnaires analysed by structural equation modelling, and then from six semi-structured interviews interpreted unexplainable results of the quantitative one. The results indicated that consumers tended to modify four retail brand image of parent brand rather than to directly change it, after both the retail brand image of the sub-brand and image fit affected the extension attitude. The functional image had the most significant feedback effect via the extension attitude. The store image rejected in the quantitative findings might be an influential factor in the qualitative ones. The service image had a direct impact on the parent brand image. Image fit affected the extension attitude but directly affected only the functional and affective image of the parent brand.