In recent years, firms have been employing brand extension strategy as a strategic alternative to reduce excessive promotional costs and market entry risks associated with new product launches, and to rapidly enhance consumer awareness of new products. Reflecting the importance of brand extensions, many marketing researchers have studied how extension brands are influenced by parent brands, primarily based on categorization theory, reporting that greater similarity or fit leads to more favorable image formation toward the extension brand. However, categorization theory, which serves as the theoretical foundation for the relationship between the parent brand and the extension brand, provides an insufficient explanation of what cognitive processing consumers undergo when evaluating an extension brand that fails to activate the parent brand. Additionally, it is necessary to examine under what conditions the similarity between the parent brand and the extension brand, as conceptualized through categorization theory, produces a strong brand effect. Therefore, this study theoretically and empirically examined how the processing of the parent brand schema based on categorization theory and the analogous product schema based on analogical learning theory serve as evaluative reference criteria for consumers' extension brand evaluation, and how these are applied depending on the cognitive situation confronting the consumer.