A brand extension strategy helps focus on successfully launching products and services in lateral market segments and categories. Adopting this approach to improve brand growth has its own benefits and risks, including the danger of alienating customers. However, it also enabled brands to capitalize on new opportunities to penetrate new markets and generate sticky revenue streams. Here’s one such example of how a leading auto manufacturer embraced a research-backed brand extension strategy to create awareness and capitalize on market reach.
Steps to Create a Successful Brand Extension Strategy
Creating the right brand extension strategy can help you tap into new opportunities and revenue streams that were inaccessible earlier. However, you need to make sure that you’re moving in the right direction by making appropriate market data-based decisions.
- Analyze the market and identify customer needs
- Understand brand equity
- Research your existing audience and identify potential prospects
- Leverage the data gathered to create a brand extension strategy
Developing a brand extension strategy has become imperative to success in today’s competitive automotive landscape. To learn more about how we can help you
Business Challenge
Evolving megatrends, digitization, and globalization are redefining the automotive landscape by creating new markets and business opportunities. These megatrends have also impacted lifestyles and living standards globally, leading to an upturn of demand and new opportunities for automotive companies to expand their market share using a well-crafted brand extension strategy. As a result, targeting new customers and addressing their demands is becoming challenging for automotive companies globally. This has prompted businesses to implemented cross-border M&As and multi-branding strategies.
Facing a decline in demand, a leading Switzerland-based automotive manufacturer set out to address customer needs using a research-backed approach. The automotive company witnessed a huge first-quarter loss in 2020. Although its recently launched XUV model was positioned as a mass-market car, the reason for the huge loss was traced back to a decline in market demand for fuel-run vehicles.
Amid its recent losses, the automotive company also announced the launch of its line of electric cars with high-tech functionalities. This certainly was an intriguing expansion, mainly because their cars are among the most sought-after in the luxury cars segment. The company hoped to combat one of the main reasons for its huge loss by offering its own presumably less expensive electric version.
Despite having a good reputation as an early innovator in the luxury car segments, the client found it hard to make inroads into the electric vehicles market. This was when they approached Infiniti Research seeking help to devise a brand extension strategy backed by research information. By collaborating with us, the automotive manufacturer wanted to understand the market implications of developing electric cars to supplement their existing models.
Having worked with auto manufacturers from across geographies we understand the market scenario and challenges facing players in this segment. If you’re one among them, request a free proposal to learn how advanced, research-based brand development strategies can help you.
Our Approach to Brand Extension Strategy Creation
Our experts began the project with extensive qualitative research and conducted semi-structured interviews with leading companies from similar industries in Switzerland to help the client. The second phase of this study focused on conducting detailed market, competitor, and consumer research to gain a comprehensive understanding of brand fit. We also leveraged a quantitative market research approach combined with open-ended questions to gather the information that the client needed to make the right brand extension decisions, which in turn shaped their brand extension strategy and plan of execution.
Outcome
The in-depth market study helped the client identify and analyze drivers for brand extension. It also offered information on market demand and unraveled new opportunities to further expand its market footprint. Apart from helping the client co-create a brand extension strategy, our experts helped them leverage market data to understand how the new launch would cannibalize sales of their current XUV models, the incremental sales they could achieve using a well-defined brand extension strategy, and the predicted ROI from the new electric cars segment.
The results obtained include:
- A 17% increase in ROI
- Stabilized market position
- Improved brand growth
We can help you make strategic decisions around brand repositioning using in-depth market research insights. Request more info for personalized solutions.
