Alliance de marques et création de valeur : une approche interorganisationnelle - Application aux marchés du commerce équitable et de l’alimentation santé

Brands, frequently being perceived as quality signals, reach today their limits on the market. Then to be differentiated and to reinforce their position, many companies launched out in brand alliances defined as the combination of two brands in a same product or a service. The previous studies on brand alliances are mainly focused on marketing aspects centered on the consumer. However brand alliances take place in a very aggressive competing context and several problems of sharing of the benefit, of reduction of costs and finally the question of value creation are addressed to these companies. So we seek to determine the ways to create and to maintain value of brand alliances in an interorganizational perspective. On the basis of previous researches on brand alliances, we underline the importance of organizational issues. We propose an analytical framework of brand alliances in using various key components: environment of the alliance, actors involved and their objectives, their behaviors, resources and governance mechanisms mobilized. With a qualitative methodology applied to case studies, we use this analytical framework for three types of brand alliances, in the fair trade market, the nutritional health market and the dietary food supplement market. We conducted 40 semi-directive interviews completed with 10 questionnaires. We obtain two key results. First, we show that value creation processes in brand alliances can be analyzed in a static and dynamic situation in using key components which are at the basis of the value creation process. Second, we produce knowledge through our proposed analytical framework, to the functioning of brand alliances from an interorganizationnal point of view.