How to Brand Next Generation Product - a Study by Hbs Marketing Faculty
RESEARCH & IDEAS
How to Brand a Next-Generation Product
Published: April 23, 2012 Author: Carmen Nobel Upgrades to existing product lines make up a huge part of corporate research and development activity, and with every upgrade comes the decision of how to brand it. Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek teamed up with London Business School 's Marco Bertini to suss out the best practices for naming next-generation products. Key concepts include: • Companies often take one of two tacks in naming a next-generation product—the sequential naming approach or the complete name change approach. • Experimental research showed that each naming approach affects customer expectations. With a name change, research participants expected features that were distinctly different or new. With a name continuation, they just expected improved performance on existing features. • Companies must assess risk versus reward when branding a product upgrade, weighing the excitement generated by a new name against the danger of scaring away customers who worry that new features pose the threat of new glitches and a steep learning curve. companies deal with the dilemma of how to brand the next- generation of an existing product. Product upgrades make up the majority of corporate research and development activity. That 's why Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek were surprised to find a dearth of academic research on the subject. "There 's a lot of research about new-product branding, but as best as we could tell, nobody had looked closely at the issue of how to brand a successive generation," Gourville says. To that end, Gourville and Ofek teamed up with London Business School professor Marco Bertini (HBS DBA '06) to suss out the best practices for branding next-generation products. "For managers, this is not a trivial decision," Ofek says. "Consumers don 't necessarily read specs to learn about new features,
How to Brand a Next-Generation Product
Published: April 23, 2012 Author: Carmen Nobel Upgrades to existing product lines make up a huge part of corporate research and development activity, and with every upgrade comes the decision of how to brand it. Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek teamed up with London Business School 's Marco Bertini to suss out the best practices for naming next-generation products. Key concepts include: • Companies often take one of two tacks in naming a next-generation product—the sequential naming approach or the complete name change approach. • Experimental research showed that each naming approach affects customer expectations. With a name change, research participants expected features that were distinctly different or new. With a name continuation, they just expected improved performance on existing features. • Companies must assess risk versus reward when branding a product upgrade, weighing the excitement generated by a new name against the danger of scaring away customers who worry that new features pose the threat of new glitches and a steep learning curve. companies deal with the dilemma of how to brand the next- generation of an existing product. Product upgrades make up the majority of corporate research and development activity. That 's why Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek were surprised to find a dearth of academic research on the subject. "There 's a lot of research about new-product branding, but as best as we could tell, nobody had looked closely at the issue of how to brand a successive generation," Gourville says. To that end, Gourville and Ofek teamed up with London Business School professor Marco Bertini (HBS DBA '06) to suss out the best practices for branding next-generation products. "For managers, this is not a trivial decision," Ofek says. "Consumers don 't necessarily read specs to learn about new features,