Study Of The Factors That Influence The Brand Extension Of Consumer Electronics

With the fast-developing global economic integration and ever-changingscience&technology, the market competition is becoming unprecedentedly intense.The products have been segemented in the market in accordance with the cosumerdemand and, at the same time, show a tendency of homogeneity. Not only the updateof the products is getting increasingly fast, but also the product marketing costsincrease day by day. Under the circumstances, Brand Extension Strategy has appealedto more and more enterprises and has become a major way of dealing with the intensecompetition. Brand Extension Strategy means tranferring the original brand equity toa new field, which can save the market-entry costs of new products, reduce risks,enhance the success rate of product launch, and even further expand the original brandequity. The study of brand extension has been persistently heating up with academiapaying more attention and the enterprises in each field reinforcing its practice,Under the influence of economic crisis and hi-tech development,cosumerelectronics industry has gone through fluctuation in recent years. Due to the intensemarket competition and the influence of current financial environmen, diversificationhas become the option for many consumer electronics enterprises and brand extensionhas got increasingly common in cosumer electronics industry. However, althoughthere are a lot of studies into brand extension at home and abroad, yet the researchangles are mostly decentralized. The western scholars usually analyze it in a singlelevel, thus leaving few systematic theoretical analysis. Moreover, the researches athome mostly use the foreign studies for reference, theorefore, have a lot in common.In empirical study, the object of study is mostly fast-moving consumer brands, worthexploring whether this can be expanded to other fields. The study into brand extensionin other fileds is yet to be developed, and there are few articles specifically studyingthe brand extension of consumer electronics, thus leaving almost no empirical studyresults about this subject. Therefore, the theoretical studies at home cannot provideeffective guidance for they cannot keep pace with the quickly-expanding consumerelectronics enterprises.Consequently, this thesis aims to explore the factors that influence the brandextension of consumer eletronics brands by choosing consumer eletronic brands as theobject of study based on the existing theory and the features of consumer electronicsindustry under China’s cultural and consumption environment. It puts forward thestudy hypothesis and theoretical model of four key factors—parent-brand-perceivedquality, brand extension history, marketing support and the integrating degree betweenextended product and parent brand. This thesis is based on the local brands anddomestic consumers by the means of empirical research in order to make the researchresults more close to the real situation. It means a lot whether it comes to enrichingthe theory or guiding the enterprises practice and also provides reference for domesticconsumer eletronics enterprises to understand customers’ process of thought, set outappropriate brand extension and marketing propagation strategies and avoid extension misunderstand.This study, at last, has recycled210valid questionnaires conducted by field andweb investigation with Lenovo, its cellphones and tablet PCs, Xiaoming, its set topbox and smart television as the object of study. After data analysis and processing, theconlusion is drawn as follows:3factors including the integrating degree betweenextended product and parent brand, brand extension history and marketing supporthave significantly positive influence on extension success, among which theintegrating degree is the most important. What’s against the previous studies is thatparent-brand-perceived quality exerts no obvious influence on extension success. Thisresult has rung an alarm bell for consumer electronic enterprises’s extension strategyimplementation. They shouldn’t overly rely on the power of parent brands becauseparent brand quality is the premise of brand extension instead ofits sufficient condition.