Communicating kinship: Beware mistaken identity in brand extensions

Abstract

The authors’ experience in tracking over a hundred different markets in Australia alone, and within those, observing the attempted communication of numerous brand extensions has revealed a key recurring problem — the inability of the brand extension to be lifted out of, and clearly differentiated from, the context of existing items already carrying that brand name. In essence, it amounts to a failure to explicitly communicate the relationship of the new variant to ‘the old’ or pre-existing variants. The authors demonstrate the extent of the problem using several case histories, and suggest a solution.