An Empirical Analysis Of Brand Extension Evaluation Model Basing On Consumers' Product Knowledge

At present, with the arrival of global economic integration and informationization era, market competition has increased from pure product competition to intangible brand competition. As market competition becomes much fierce and the introduction fee of new products becomes much high, more and more companies take the measure of brand extension, which means carrying the old brand into the new products. Just since the 80's of the last century, brand extension has become a hot topic of both theoretical field and practical field. Scholars generally agree that whether brand extension succeeds or not mostly depends on the consumer evaluations of brand extension. After Aaker put forward the model of consumer evaluations of brand extension creatively in 1990, scholars all over the world did some researches to verify and revise the model from different cultural and consuming backgrounds. However, they didn't get a unanimous conclusion.Under Chinese cultural and consuming background, this research took some brands of fast-moving consumer goods such as food and articles for daily use as research objective. Basing on A&K's model, this research introduced a new independent variable (price of extension product) and an adjustive variable (consumers' product knowledge). Then the research examined the relationship of independent variables, adjustive variables and dependent variable empirically. The research collected some data through questionnaires and analyzed the data with SPSS.Comparing with A&K's conclusion, we found that the cross of extension product's price and product association influences consumer evaluations of brand extension significantly, but there is a negative correlation between (manufacturing difficulty) and consumer evaluations of brand extension. Furthermore, the research also illustrated that there is a difference in the angles of consumer evaluation of brand extension between the consumer group who learned more product knowledge (experts) and the consumer group who learned less (novices). In the end, from the angle of the mental and behavioral characters of Chinese consumers, the research explained the differences and ended up with some suggestions and revelations for domestic companies' marketing practice.