“What makes a label sell: its name or the person behind it?” (The Guardian, 3-3-2000) It seems like fashion houses have spent the last decade playing the musical chairs game with their fashion designers (Socha, 2012). At Saint Laurent Paris, for instance, Hedi Slimane, who was the label’s men’s creative director from 1997 to 2000, came back as creative director in 2012 to replace Stefano Pilati (2004-2012) who, himself, had replaced Tom Ford (2000-2004) previously. Meanwhile, at Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière left Balenciaga to fill the shoes of Marc Jacobs who had been creative director for the label since the late 1990s (1997-2013). And at Dior, Raf Simons took over from Bill Gaytten (2011-2012) who had discretely held the ship after the abrupt departure of John Galliano (1996-2011). The phenomenon of a brand having to replace a key persona with whom it is cobranded is far from rare: sports team regularly draft new athletes, television screenwriters kill beloved characters because actors are leaving their shows, and political parties must replace departing leaders. In these contexts, as in fashion firms, maintaining brand equity across successive cobranding alliances with key personae is a challenging brand management issue. In this research project, we aim to further our understanding of how fashion brands can maintain equity by examining how they manage ongoing cobranding between the house and the designer, especially given the challenges faced by the succession of designers – or game of musical chairs - most houses face. The research questions guiding this effort are as follows: 1) Why do fashion houses cobrand with key personas? 2) What challenges are associated with cobranding with key personas? and 3) What strategies are enacted to address these challenges? To investigate these questions, we have examined the ways that some of the most successful fashion houses manage their brand equity through the dynamics of cobranding. We illustrate our findings with the case of Saint Laurent Paris, a fashion house established in 1968 by Algerian-born French designer Yves Saint Laurent. In this abstract, we first review some key literature on cobranding, then discuss our methodology. We conclude by presenting our preliminary findings. Theoretical Perspectives on Cobranding A generic definition of cobranding refers to it as an alliance “in which two or more brands are presented to the public” (Newmeyer, Venkatesh and Chatterjee 2014). In practice, conceptualizations of cobranding vary. One that is common entails “ingredient branding” in which a key ingredient of one brand is some other brand, such as an Intel chip inside a Dell computer (e.g., Desai and Keller 2002). Another common conceptualization refers to two parent brands launching a new product, as when “two leading fashion houses…join forces to create a new line of clothing” (Monga and Lau-Gesk 2007, 391). Recent work has also acknowledged that cobranding can take place between people and brands. For example Wilcox and Carroll (2008) discuss celebrity cobranding, wherein a celebrity cobrands with a product brand. And in the organizational literature, the fact that a CEO’s personal brand is intermingled with that of the company that person manages has been well recognized (e.g., Graffin, Carpenter, and Boivie 2011). Our conceptualization of fashion designers as cobranded with the houses that employ them is consistent with such research, in that it considers a type of cobranding in which an employee who is a key persona in a company, and that company’s product offerings, are together presented to the public. A frequent assumption in much cobranding research is that it takes places “between two successful brands” (Monga and Lau-Gesk 2007, 389); however, in practice, it is possible for the two brands in an alliance to vary in the extent to which they are already well known and successful (Cunha, Forehand and Angle 2015). Further, cobranding arrangements can vary in terms of the level of integration; in some instances, cobranding might entail mere co-location, whereas in others, the brand partnership may mean that the features of the each brand are tightly integrated and difficult to decouple (Newmeyer et al. 2014). Relatedly, cobranding may vary in terms of duration, ranging from a promotional cobranding that is intentionally short-lived to enduring cobranding that is intended to persist for years or decades. The focus of past cobranding research has frequently been on exploring how consumers respond to cobrands. However, scholarly attention has also been turned to the strategies that firms use to manage the challenges of cobranding. Our work falls within the latter category. Methodology Data Collection To examine the dynamics of cobranding with a key persona in the fashion context, we collected a combination of archival and observational data from five major fashion houses: Balenciaga, Dior, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Saint Laurent Paris. The archival data includes articles drawn from the fashion coverage of the last fifteen years of: The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph and Le Monde. Coverage from fashion industry key media references such as Women’s Wear Daily, Style.com and Vogue.com is comprised as well. Using Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, and the fashion houses’ own digital archives, we searched and collected articles that pertained to the disintegration of the cobranded alliance and integration into of the new cobranded alliance for the fashion houses mentioned above. In our dataset, we also included reviews of promotional materials such as fashion exhibitions (e.g., Müller and Chenoune’s (2010) “Yves Saint Laurent”), and popular culture artifacts such as films (e.g., Lespert’s (2014) “Yves Saint Laurent”). Furthermore, to help us contextualize the branding strategies and practices of the fashion houses, we reviewed documentaries and books published about the fashion industry such as Nicklaus (2012) “Fashion Go Global,” English’s (2007) “A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th century,” Palomo-Lovinski’s (2010) “The World’s Most influential Fashion Designers,” and Steele and Menkes’ (2012) “Fashion Designers: A-Z.” Finally, our archival dataset was complemented by observational data gathered from visits to the fashion houses’ New York City flagships and department stores’ concessions. Data Analysis Following the conventions of qualitative research (Belk, Fischer and Kozinets 2013), the analysis of our data was an iterative process of interpreting, deriving new questions, searching for and collecting new data, and rejecting, confirming, and refining our emerging interpretation until reaching sufficient interpretive convergence and theoretical saturation. We present a summary of our findings in the next section. Findings Below, we indicate our answers to the three research questions raised in the beginning of this abstract. 1) Why do fashion houses cobrand with key personas? Luxury fashion houses operate in an institutional field where the logic of art and the logic of commerce are intertwined (Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013). While fashion may not be art per se, well-respected figures such as Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s longtime romantic and business partner, consider that it requires an artist to create fashion (Bergé, 2015). Dion and Arnould (2011), in their research on the charismatic aura of contemporary luxury fashion designers, have argued that managing the relationship between a fashion house and its artist, i.e. the designer, is an essential element of successful luxury brand management. In the fashion industry, cobranding efforts between a fashion house and a designer thus appears to be a deeply institutionalized norm from which deviating could be risky. One reason behind this institutionalized norm is that the business of fashion requires constant renewal (e.g., Agogué and Nainville, 2010). The introduction of a new designer within an established house can serve this renewal purpose. Moreover, as celebrity culture seems to pervade every sphere of life, the phenomenon of celebrity designers resonates with broader socio-cultural trends (Agins, 2014; Oeppen and Jamal, 2014), reinforcing the value of a key persona’s vibrant image. 2) What challenges are associated with cobranding with key personas? For a fashion house, at least two challenges are associated with cobranding with a key persona: 1) maintaining brand continuity and 2) protecting the brand from a key persona’s imperfections. The first challenge implies that while the nature of the fashion industry invites brands to constantly refresh their offerings and engage in innovation (Oeppen and Jamal, 2014), fashion houses, like other brands, must also strive to maintain brand continuity in order to preserve their brand equity (Keller, 2000). Maintaining brand continuity while keeping the brand fresh suggests maintaining a clear and differentiated brand positioning while enrolling new brand meanings that can sometimes be contradictory or counterintuitive (e.g., “Gucci's top designer to refashion YSL look,” Finn, 2000). When a fashion house joins forces with a key persona, the aesthetic, style and cut of what the designer creates must somehow blend with the core attributes of the fashion house to create, an overall brand experience that is innovative, yet reminiscent of the house’s signature. The second challenge fashion houses face when cobranding with a key persona is protecting the brand from human imperfections. Among these “imperfections,” the most obvious is the inevitable mortality of key personas. In addition, key personas, by virtue of being human, have other purposes in life than consistently serving the market. Their actions and behaviors may sometimes conflict with, be counterproductive to, and/or undermine their own brand equity development (Parmentier and Fischer, 2012,) and that of their partner in a cobranding alliance (e.g., Béroard and Parmentier, 2014). 3) What strategies are enacted to address these challenges? We identify strategies enacted to disintegrate relationships with designers who are departing and those used to integrate new designers into cobranded relationships with the houses that hire them. Examples of strategies enacted to disintegrate cobranding relationships include “erasing” “denigrating,” and “respectfully acknowledging” the departing designer. Examples of integrating strategies include “legacy linking,” “restricting sphere of influence,” “fostering self promotion,” and “encouraging innovation.” The paper defines these strategies, notes that they are not mutually exclusive but rather may be complementary, offers examples of all strategies drawing on the data collected, and offers preliminary insights on the implications of these strategies.

Driven by the unavailibility of commercial test equipment for tensile and creep testing at temperatures up to 3000°C a measuring system has been developed and constructed at the University of Applied Sciences, Jena. These temperatures are reached with precision by heating samples directly by electric current. Contact-less strain measurements are carried out with image processing software utilizing a CCD camera system. This paper covers results of creep tests which have been conducted on TZM sheet material (thickness 2 mm) in different heat-treatment conditions in the temperature range between 1200°C and 1600°C.