Match Affecting On Brand Extension Based On Regulatory Focus

Brand extension is one of the most commonly used products strategy when an enterprise launches new products. When the enterprise can successfully take advantage of brand extension, it not only can make extended products successfully into consumption market but also increase the value of the original brand. However, not all brands can be extended arbitrarily, which is a double-edged sword because its failure may have a negative impact on the original brand, described as "throw good money after bad". Since the1990s, many Chinese enterprises began to try to brand extension, but most of them ended in failure.They not only have gotten no the positive effect of brand extension from the western theories but hurt the original brand, which is mainly because the difference between China’s market environment and west one so that most of the west theory cannot well explain many phenomena in the development of Chinese enterprises. Therefore, the brand extension and brand management is very necessary combined with the actual situation of China’s enterprise.With summarizing and analyzing previous studies, this paper focuses on the relation between the perceived match that is the critical success factors of brand extension and evaluation of brand extension based on the Chinese market environment. On account of the different consumers thinking ways may affect themselves purchasing behaviors, this paper introduces regulatory focus theory of the basic theory in psychology into marketing to construct the brand extension evaluation model.In this research, we select two well-known Chinese local brands, White Rabbit and Nongfushangquan, and their extend brands including existing products in reality and virtual ones. This paper obtains samples data through questionnaires, and study with these statistical methods such as relevant statistical analysis, regression analysis and two-ways ANOVA. The results confirmed the relation model of brand extension constructed:(1)Consumer perceived match has a significant positive effect on brand extension evaluation. The higher the match is, the higher the brand extension evaluation will be, and the replacement has the strongest effect on it.(2)Different individuals’regulatory focus will obviously influence on the relation between the perceived match and brand extension evaluation. The higher the perceived match, the higher the brand extension evaluation from promotion focused consumers but prevention focused ones have the same evaluation of brand extension what the perceived match is high or not.