Valuing Brand Collaboration: Evidence From a Natural Experiment

We study complementarities between brands in the context of collaborations across museums. Over the course of our sample, one major museum with a highly recognized brand closed temporarily and sequentially collaborated with two established local museums. With individual panel data on museum memberships around these events, we measure how collaborations affect demand using an empirical framework of complementarities that are newly applied to the branding context. We observe two counter-acting demand patterns. First, customers with no history of buying membership from either museum enter the market, suggesting brand complementarities. Second, a sub-group of customers who previously purchased from either or both of the museums display decreased demand, consistent with brand dilution. Any structural approach that models the demand for collaboration with existing preferences for separate brands fails to create accurate demand predictions. The magnitude of the offsetting forces varies between collaboration events, which makes demand prediction even more challenging. These results call for a theory of brand being beyond a fixed utility primitive and have implications for counterfactuals that involve combining or altering of brands..