Brand extensions positioning guidelines for competitive differentiation

Abstract

In the era of hyper competition, increasingly more companies pursue competitive differentiation by creating brand extensions. Each brand extension promises to be new, bigger or better, but in reality most of these brand extensions fail to be unique and to exert a certain appeal to consumers. In these circumstances, competitive differentiation has become extremely important because it can create and sustain a strong competitive advantage. A meaningful positioning strategy creates competitive differentiation by providing consumers reasons to buy the brand. The purpose of this article is to present a brand positioning framework for competitive differentiation through brand extensions. A careful examination of brand extensions and competitive differentiation related issues is provided. Based on this examination, we provide brand managers a detailed guide for identifying and establishing brand positioning bases for brand extensions. We further elaborate some useful brand positioning guidelines for brand extensions.