مدیریت استراتژیک محصول و پسوند های برند: گسترش برندهای سازمانی در B2B در مقابل بازار B2C Strategic management of product and brand extensions: Extending corporate brands in B2B vs. B2C markets

1. Introduction Be it Oracle, Microsoft or Google, to remain relevant to customers and sustain profitable growth over time, firms across industrial markets must further develop their existing markets and pay attention to potential opportunities. In this regard, the critical questions for marketing theory and practice are: How should a firm expand existing markets and unlock new market opportunities to ensure strong firm growth? And are the findings from a business-to-consumer (B2C) brand necessarily applicable to a business-to-business (B2B) firm? Considering product and brand extensions as two primary growth strategies for firms (Aaker, 2004), the pressing concern is the extent to which each growth strategy contributes to a firm’s profit. Moreover, due to several important differences between the B2B and B2C market structures, including identifiability and accessibility of customers and their level of product and market knowledge as well as the relative importance of customized solutions and relationship management to name but a few (Abrahamsen, Henneberg, Huemer, & Naude, 2016; Calantone, Di Benedetto, & Song, 2010; Eisingerich, Rubera, & Seifert, 2009; Hutt & Speh, 2012; Mudambi, 2002), the effects of product and brand extensions on firm profit in the B2B market are likely to differ from the B2C market. We thus aim to complement and extend the current body of work in B2B markets (Grewal, Cornerm, & Mehta, 2001; Kohtamäki & Rajala, 2016; La Rocca, Moscatelli, Perna, & Snehota, 2016; Lindgreen, Hingley, Grant, & Morgan, 2012; Vallaster & Lindgreen, 2011). Addressing the above concerns is challenging for several reasons. First, there is remarkably few prior research work that helps us to understand the relationship between product extensions and firm profit. There is previous research (Kadiyali, Vilcassim, & Chintagunta, 1998; Ramdas & Sawhney, 2001) that examined the relationship between line extensions and firm profit. We find it difficult, however, to decipher the true relationship between product extensions and firm profit based on such research due to the different definitions of line extensions, used in the prior work, versus product extensions, examined in the present research. Kadiyali, Vilcassim, and Chintagunta (1998, p. 339), for instance, defined a line extension as “the introduction of a new product that is a variant of the firm’s existing product in a given category,” and Reddy, Holak, and Bhat (1994, p. 243) defined a line extension activity as “the use of an established brand for a new offering in the same product class or category that differs from its parent brand in relatively minor ways, such as flavors, sizes, and compositions.” In this paper, we define product extensions as variants or modified versions of a firm’s initial product that are intended to capture new markets. New markets are operationalized in terms of new customers for existing usage applications, new usage applications for existing customers, or new customers for new usage applications. This definition of product extensions is more specific and narrow in scope than that of line extensions used in prior work because the former is applied only to the primary feature-based variations of the initial product but not to the minor, secondary feature-based variations (see the Method section for a more specific discussion). As will be discussed later, including both primary and secondary feature-based variations of an existing product as part of line extensions is most likely to distort their respective impacts. Furthermore, product extensions, when defined in the context of capturing new markets, may also have different effects on firm-level profit, depending on the type of market (B2B versus B2C).