Brand extension is the most commonly used marketing strategy in todays world. Marketing managers have become risk averters than risk takers. This is due to high cost and risk involved in new product development and frequent failures of new product ideas in the marketplace. This kind of situation in new product innovation and launch have forced marketers to take the safest strategic alternative. This alternative is of extending one successful brand to another category or within the same product range. When a brand is a success in one category, a brand manager would like to encash the success and use the same brand name for creating a demand-pull in another category. This process is typically called horizontal extension in which the master brand is taken to other product categories. This article proposes two factors viz., brand relatedness and brand dominance to find out the level of both image and attribute fit for the success of the extension. The article also suggests the situations and parameters which are necessary for doing successful brand extension.

A successful brand manager focuses on the most profitable customers with most profitable products/brands. He delivers a clear sales proposition that convinces his customers and beats the competitors in the industry. They are able to find new customers who are as profitable as the existing ones and offer product and service brands that suits most to the needs of the new customers. The philosophy of good management is all about following the above stated dream. Let us recapture again. A good brand manager builds a strong brand and develops a loyal set of customers. These loyal sets of customers are able to establish a strong link between the brand and their consumption choice.

Looking at the success of a brand, brand managers would like to take the same brand name and launch either another variant in the same product line or a new product so that the value of the original brand can be directly transferred to the new brands. This helps the brand manager in many ways. The most important reason for such a strategy is to obtain an immediate connection from the customers with the new product category or brand and achieve success in the market. The customers also find the new product with the extended brand name more relevant and expect that the new product/brand will deliver similar satisfaction and value to them like the old brand. So, brand managers extend the original brand name to similar or other product categories and keep on selling to the existing and new customers and delivering higher value and satisfaction to the customers.

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