In this turbulent, complex and competitive business environment, the companies need to adopt many marketing strategies to stay ahead in the market. One of the widely used marketing strategies is to keep launching new products with a lot of varieties for outpacing competitors. Another aspect is brand extensions. Brand extension is defined as attaching an existing brand name to a new product introduced in a different product category. This article tries to find out some of the factors that are considered to be important whenever the company pursues brand extension strategies, specially in the Indian market scenario.1.

Introduction In today’s competitive market, having a well thought out marketing strategy is a key contribution to corporate success. One of the widely used marketing strategies is to keep launching new products with lots of varieties for outpacing competitors. For many companies the risks of entering new markets or launching new products or services are quite substantial.(Boush and Loken 1991; John and Loken 1992). One way of dealing with these risks is to use the familiarity and prestige, or rather, the image of brands as leverage for enhancing credibility and unobservable quality. Brands enable consumers to efficiently encode their functional and emotional values in their minds. The resulting images enable consumers to recognize the points of difference between competing brands. During the past two decades, researches have proven that brands are among a company’s most important assets (Kapferer, 2001).

Indeed, one could argue that the most real and marketable assets of many organizations are the brand names that they have developed. Brands help differentiate and position a company’s products. They also help a company establish and/or maintain a stable relationship with its consumers. Furthermore, brands provide a launching pad for new products (Kapferer 2000). As new product failure remains high and increased competition in distribution channels combined with spiraling advertising costs have made new brandlaunches more difficult. Using a familiar and established brand name to generate product acceptance is an increasingly popular growth strategy. A range of brand leveraging strategies exist. Some of the most important brand leveraging strategies followed in the marketing practices are, (Building Brands – Aaker 2002).

Marketing, strategies, consumers, product, corporate, competitive business environment,product category,marketing strategy, corporate success, enhancing credibility,unobservable quality, functional and emotional values, company’s products,spiraling advertising costs, marketing practices.