Risk! How to win in the game of brand extension

Helen Wing, global innovation director at Research International, finds that despite client willingness to launch brand extensions, they are more likely to fail than new products (which are also highly risky).

Risk! How to Win in the Game of Brand Extension

Helen Wing

The big buzzword of marketing in the 1990s was branding. Understanding a brand's core values, strengths, weaknesses or image became top priority for brand managers and their competitors. But once you have got this information, what can you actually do with it? More recently, the focus has shifted away from analysing brands, towards seeing exactly how far brands can reach.

The result is that extensions of existing brands dominate product and service launches, picking up the hype and headlines that new brands once did. In the last few...

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