Research On Product Identity Based On Brand Extensions

With the fast growth in economics and becoming the WTO membership, a lot of firms modify their strategies to adapt the trend of globalization and to enhance the competitive ability over the world. Brand strategy is the one of the most important methods that enables firms to get success from the competition and to keep eternal development. Brand extension strategy is increasingly adopted by firms. Taking America for example, among the new consumed products in last 10 years,95% of them were made from brand extension strategy, and only 5% of them were made in new brands. Quite a lot of firms have owned brands that have market reputation, and new products are then made based on their brands'influences.In china, brand extension strategy is used widely, but not all final outcomes are successful. However, there is no doubt that we have found many problems existed in the development of domestic firms. For instance, many firms might lose long-term objectives and plan in order to grab short-term economic benefits. Under brand extension strategy, product lines start to extend horizontally and vertically. Compared with previous single product line, it is vaguer and more disorder in product recognition system. As the final medium of brand, a product plays a significant role in the success of the brand extension strategy. Hence, it is a tough challenge to product image recognition design which is under brand extension strategy.From this objective, this thesis makes an intensive improvement based on the general process of product identity, and builds up a product identity design process that based on brand extension strategy. The research of the combination of Product identity system and brand extension strategy enriches the connotation of product recognition system, making it more intensive in theory research as well as in practical adoption.This thesis built a analytical model of relationships of each image in brand extension:original brand image-original product image-augmented product-image, based on the theories of brand and brand image. After the research on different kinds of household appliance brand that used brand extension strategy, we found that it can be divided into related categories extension and unrelated categories extension. Using the analytical model, some product identity design principles based on brand extension can be founded, which can also guide the improvement of product identity design process. Finally, the thesis built the improved product identity design process with the brand extension evaluation system.Through the application of Siemens product design, process of product identity based on brand extension is verified to be effective. Also it can make the augmented product emphasize own image features, keep the inconsistency with original brand and product image, which will make for success of brand extensions.