Feel the Brand Love

Launching new products can be an attractive growth strategy. Many companies see brand extensions as a lucrative way to increase revenue and build their customer base. Thus, marketers take a brand name that's doing well (think Starbuck's coffee) and use it to name a different product made or marketed by the firm (think Starbuck's chocolates, on-the-go drinks, coffee mugs). The extent to which consumers like these brand extensions is—no surprise here—affected by the quality of the brand extension itself and the benefits it brings. But when researchers took a closer look at brand extension love, they found a couple of surprises:

1. The parent brand comes first. A more emotionally primitive factor affecting love for a brand extension is the consumer's love for the parent brand. In other words, brand extensions are more successful and succeed more rapidly when they come from parent brands that consumers already adore.
2. Product category comes second. Consumers are actually less concerned that the brand extension is related to the product category of the parent brand. (Think Starbucks Entertainment?) The main factor touching their hearts is the parent brand itself.

In an increasingly borderless world in which brands can be as powerful as currency, stretching brands that already have strong equity has become an ever more important avenue for growth—and apparently, that's a smart choice.

The Po!nt: Make sure they feel the brand love. Having an adored brand gives you loads of opportunities for growth with innovative brand extensions.

Source: "Does Loving a Brand Mean Loving Its Products? The Role of Brand-Elicited Affect in Brand Extension Evaluations" by Catherine W. M. Yeung, Robert S. Wyer Jr. Journal of Marketing Research, 2005. Read the article here.

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