A STUDY ON KEY DIMENSIONS OF DIFFERENT VARIABLES FOR CONSUMER ACCEPTANCE OF BRAND EXTENSION

A successful brand works as an emotional attachment force that always encourages consumer’s perception toward that brand among the other brands. A new product’s brand name is an important determinant of its success in the market place (Cooper, 1994). A successful brand makes this relationship stronger than earlier. Now-a-days firms are increasingly seeking to leverage this good relationship by extending their brands into new product areas and that is brand extension ,refers to the use of established franchise to a different product class (Keller, 2008).Substantial research has been done on how consumers evaluate brand extensions (e.g. ;Keller,2003;Balachander and Ghose ,2003).Because These days Brand extension is a very popular way of the organizations to challenge the competition with new intensity because new product with a new brand name is always risky and there lies a lot uncertainty that the product may not be accepted. The statistics tells new products experience failure rates between 80% and 90 %, and brand extension fails at a lower rate (Keller 2003).Another advantage of using brand extension is the reduction of communication costs (Tauber, 1981; Aaker, 1990; Aaker and Keller, 1990)5.Instead of launching a new brand, brand extension is becoming a branding strategy for new products. For Fast Moving Consumer Goods as well as services, more than 80% of the new products introduced are brand extensions (Rangaswamy, et.al., 1993; Ernest and Young and Nielsen 1999) Keller (2003).