A designerly approach to the development of brand extensions - Bridging the divide between behavioural research and design science
Maaike Mulder-Nijkamp is a PhD student in the department Product-Market Relations. (Co)Supervisors are prof.dr.ir. J. Henseler and dr.ir. W. Eggink from the faculty of Engineering Technology.
Everything around us has been designed. All designs created by human beings consist of 'explicit cues' that convey a certain story to help us users understand what we experience. Companies use such explicit cues to build strong brands through which they aim to convince consumers by creating a meaningful and recognisable experience. By building on the recognisability of an existing brand, companies try to reduce risk when introducing new products and minimize brand start-up costs. Creating a product under an existing brand is termed a brand extension. However, launching brand extensions still involves great uncertainty and brand extension success cannot be taken for granted. In the existing literature, this challenge of developing brand extensions is studied mainly within individual disciplines, focusing on strategies or processes (innovation management) and consumer behaviour (marketing research). However, hardly any attention has yet been paid to the most important factor in this process: the design of the brand extension itself. This thesis therefore presents a new approach to developing brand extensions, focusing on the design and the designers who are responsible in creating such brand extensions. This thesis combines the knowledge from and approaches of three distinct research domains into a new overarching framework. To help reach this framework, two central research questions were posed and addressed:
1. Which factors, influenced by designers, affect the success of a brand extension?
2. How can designers be supported in influencing these factors to create successful brand extensions?
The first phase of this study examines how the literature within the research disciplines of innovation management and marketing currently influence the design of brand extensions. It also examines how these disciplines relate to the current practice of design. During this research phase, a 'research-through-design' methodology was used, leading to new insights into the complex topic of brand extensions. By introducing these new insights into the annual educational cycle, a 'living lab' was created that led to the development of a new framework and a supporting teaching program. This led to successful brand extensions from the perspectives of the brand extension designers. The ‘designerly approach’ from the living lab was accompanied by behavioural studies that evaluated potential consumers’ responses to the brand extension designs that had been created.
The response to the first research question revealed three factors that play important roles in designing successful brand extensions. One of these factors is ‘brand fit’. The relevance of brand fit is recognised in the current literature. However, the link of brand fit to the envisaged design is rarely discussed. Scholars mainly consider the type of brand extension that is to be designed, whereas the actual design of the brand extension itself is regarded as a ‘black box’. Several studies explain the importance of the semantic translation of brand values into explicit product characteristics, and highlight both the necessity and the complexity for designers to act upon this.
The following research phase led to an initial response to the second research question. The ‘Brand Translation Prism’ is a newly developed designer-focused model that explicitly connects physical product characteristics, symbolic associations and the overarching core values of the brand. The subdivision of physical product characteristics into three categories (2D, 3D and 2.5D) in the Brand Translation Prism leads to a clear overview of all the recognisable characteristics of a brand, where the newly introduced 2.5D category represents the transition between 2D and 3D elements. The Brand Translation Prism was evaluated by over 500 students at the University of Twente and the University of Antwerp, resulting in recognizable brand extensions with a strong connection to the values of the parent brand. The 2.5D features, also known as graphical elements, seem to be an effective way of conveying the core values of an existing brand to new products.
The two other factors that play a crucial role in designing successful brand extensions are ‘typicality’ and ‘novelty’. Building on the work of Hekkert et al (2003), the hypothesis follows that the joint influence of typicality and novelty should lead to brand extensions that are more successful. However, because various studies show that typicality can refer to both the brand (brand fit) and the extension (product typicality), the interplay of all three factors is complex. Thus, it appears that the influence of brand fit can be used as a suppressor or amplifier in the interplay of typicality and novelty. From the results of a large empirical study, in which a total of 81 snow mobile designs were evaluated as potential brand extensions by 47 professionals, it appeared that respondents used brand-related attributes as antitheses to novelty or as reinforcers of typicality. Therefore, the new concept of ‘brand typicality’ - combining the terms product typicality and brand fit - ultimately proved to be a better predictor of expected market success.
The response to the second research question was twofold. Our research led to the development of an overarching teaching programme which, in addition to the Brand Identity Prism, was extended by the introduction of the ‘Triangular Designer Space’. This is a newly developed model of a design space in which the determinants of typicality, novelty and brand fit jointly influence the success of brand extensions. How designers 'play' with these determinants in the design space depends on the brand and the type of brand extension. For a brand that has a more authentic character, the design space is more limited than for a brand focused on expressing innovation. On the other hand, the design space is wider for multitype extensions than for archetype extensions. Therefore, explicitly mapping the three determinants in the triangular space makes it easier for the designer to evaluate feasible design solutions. At the same time, it helps promote communication with design managers and so allows for more thorough decision-making.
The Brand Translation Prism gives future Brand Extension Designers guidance on carefully analysing the relevant factors for the development of a successful brand extension. The Triangular Designer Space thereby gives the designer the creative freedom to develop and balance these factors in an optimum way. Together, the two models make for a well-stocked toolbox for developing successful brand extensions.
