Study On Evaluation Model And Consumer Evaluation Of High-tech Brand Extension

The advantages of brand extension includes transferring brand equity to new products, decreasing the risk and cost into markets effectively and improving the successful rate of new product, then promoting brand equity farther. Therefore, many companies use brand extension to compete each other. The studies on brand extension continue to be hot with more practice and brand extension evaluation becomes the core within the studies.Oversea studies on brand extension mainly focus on consumer evaluation, and then ignore the other areas, especially the basic theoretical studies, for example, there is no research on mechanism of brand extension evaluation. To the factors influencing consumer evaluation of brand extension, oversea scholars almost study from single level, so the research angle is dispersive. While there is little research about brand extension evaluation at home, only several scholars study in every research direction, and then the scale and innovation of studies are poor. But more and more companies, including high-tech companies, use brand extension in practice, while the results about this research area can not satisfy their needs and give effective guidance. Therefore, this paper, selecting high-tech brand area as object, will discuss and study deeply about the synthetic evaluation model and consumer evaluation of brand extension.This paper firstly studies the theoretical basis, internal mechanism of brand extension evaluation, by reviewing and comparing the studies about brand extension evaluation at home and abroad. Then this paper proposes synthetic evaluation model about high-tech brand extension, including brand extension decision-making evaluation model and brand extension performance evaluation model and their separate evaluation index. This paper uses FUZZY-AHP method, and takes Hair brand extending medicine as examples to analyze the model of high-tech brand extension decision-making evaluation. At last, this paper designs the direct effects and mediating effects to consumer evaluation of high-tech brand extension by theory analysis and professional interviews, and uses LISEREL8.72 to dispose the data from consumers to consumer high-tech brand and extensions to test the hypothesis.The main body of this paper includes as follows:Firstly, this paper proposes three mechanisms about brand extension evaluation: power mechanism, psychology mechanism and reciprocal effect mechanism . Power mechanism means the mechanism if the main bodies relating with brand extension have power to evaluate the brand extension evaluation activities. There are three drivers in power mechanism about brand extension evaluation: the driver of need satisfaction, risk elusion and competition game. Psychology mechanism is the key part and the process in turn includes: direct emotion transfer, simple category judgment and matching. If the former process is finished, then the evaluation process ends; or it will turns into the next process till the evaluation finishes. Reciprocal effect mechanism means the process that the different evaluation results can influence parent brand equity.Secondly, this paper builds the synthetic model of high-tech brand extension and index evaluation system, uses FUZZY-AHP method to analyze the model of high-tech brand extension decision-making evaluation.This paper determines the comprehensive evaluation index by discussing with experts in brand extension area, managers in high-tech companies and postgraduates majoring on marketing. This index system basically includes three levels, four categories (parent brand compositeness, similarity between parent brand and extensions, internal and external environment factors), and twenty-two indexes. Then this paper judges the weight of index using AHP method by data from front-line experts. The conclusion mentions that the importance of influential factors to high-tech brand is different from the general brand. The former conclusions to the general brand extension evaluation indicate that similarity is the most important one in the first level, next is the parent brand competitiveness. From the weight of index, there is one factor ignored in the former studies, that is market competing environment, it is more important (0.309) than similarity (0.236). The reason is that the former studies mainly focus on FMCG area and in this area it has the characteristics of higher purchase frequency and lower product value, so external competitive environment factor is not apparent. But in high-tech product area, consumers are very cautious to buy and competitive brand and product have great influence to decision-making. At last, this paper uses the case of Hair brand extending medicine products to test the credibility and feasibility of evaluation model of high-tech brand extension decision-making.This paper also designs evaluation model of high-tech brand performance including brand, market and finance performance. Because the bottom indexes are quantitative ones, so this paper uses BPNN method to analyze the index system. But this paper only proposes the research ideas to give guidance for further study in this area because lacking of data from companies,Thirdly, this paper tests the hypothesis of direct effects and mediating effects of consumer evaluation of high-tech brand extension by using SEM method and data from consumer survey.The former scholars only focused on a small part factors to study consumer evaluation of brand extension (usually two factors, especially parent brand quality and similarity). So the former research lacked whole and all-around factors analysis especially ignored the relationships among the factors. This paper selects six key important factors and seven relationships among these factors by reviews, theoretical analysis and expert interviews to form direct and mediating effects of consumer evaluation of consumer high-tech brand extension. These factors are parent brand quality, history of former brand extension, parent brand credibility, market support, retailer acceptance and similarity; the relationships include: (1) the effect of parent brand quality to retailer acceptance; (2) the effect of history of former brand extension to parent brand quality; (3) the effect of history of former brand extension to parent brand credibility; (4) the effect of market support to retailer acceptance; (5) the effect of market support to similarity; (6) the effect of similarity to retailer acceptance; (7) the effect of parent brand credibility to retailer acceptance.The conclusions show by SEM analysis that these four factors have direct, distinct and positive effects to brand extension success of consumer high-tech brand companies, which are history of former brand extension, market support, retailer acceptance and similarity, and similarity is the most important among them by path coefficient. The differences lie in the conclusions that parent brand quality has no distinct and positive to brand extension success, even parent brand credibility has negative effect. Because they are the necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions, so the companies which brand have higher quality and credibility can't extend every area as what they want.There are several relationships tested in the empirical studies which have distinct and positive effects: the effect of history of former brand extension to parent brand credibility; the effect of history of former brand extension to parent brand quality; the effect of similarity to retailer acceptance; the effect of market support to similarity; and the effect of market support to retailer acceptance. Among these relationships, thetypical indirect effect path is: market support——similarity——retailer acceptance——brand extension success. Taking the relationship of history of former brand extension to other factors as example, the history of former brand extension has distinct and positive effects to parent brand quality and credibility. So the conclusion requests companies must be cautious to every brand extension plan, because the failure of this brand extension plan not only influences the results of this one, but only has indirect effect to success of next brand extension plan by influencing parent brand quality and credibility.The main innovations in this paper are as follows:1. The present of brand extension evaluation has these characteristics: the dispersive research fruits and deficiency basic theoretical studies. This paper improves the present by proposing three mechanisms based on the study about internal mechanism of brand extension evaluation: power mechanism, psychology mechanism and reciprocal effect mechanism, and then gives the basis to build synthetic model of brand extension evaluation.2. This paper changes the situation that former research mainly focused on extension decision-making (feasibility) and builds synthetic evaluation model of brand extension, then designs index system of decision-making evaluation of High-tech brand extension(which includes four first levels: parent brand competitiveness, similarity, internal and external environment) and index system of performance evaluation of High-tech brand extension(which includes three first levels: brand, market and finance performance). In these two index systems, the levels and structure of genes are all improved than before. At last, this paper use FUZZY-AHP method to analyze the model of high-tech brand extension decision-making evaluation and the conclusions mentions that competitive factor is very important to decision-making evaluation of high-tech brand extension.3. This paper breaks through the present that research on brand extension evaluation at home and abroad only focused on one or two direct effects. It tests the direct effects of six factors to brand extension evaluation, which are parent brand quality, parent brand credibility, history of former brand extension, market support, retailer acceptance and similarity between parent brand and extension. What' s more, this paper designs the mediating effects (the structural relationship among factors) which are ignored by former research.4. This paper uses SEM model in the empirical study, the result mentions that similarity is the most important factor, which is the same to the research result in FMCG area. The difference is that parent brand quality and credibility are necessary condition but not sufficient condition. In addition, the relationship among factors enriches the research results in the area of consumer evaluation of brand extension.5. Innovation on research area——High-tech brand extension area. Now, mostresearch is in FMCG area by data from student sample. It is not sure that the conclusions can be used at another area. This paper focuses on high-tech brand area and takes consumer high-tech brand as examples to test the direct effects and mediating effects of successful high-tech brand extension by data from ordinary consumers.