EXTENDING BRANDS TO EMERGING MARKETS

Abstract

Brand management has become a topic of interest in recent years. The contribution of an organisation's brand to company’s assets is now widely acknowledged and brand management is becoming a more integral part of overall business strategy. There are many important questions to be considered in regards to brand management. This thesis explores the issue of extending a brand to new geographical markets, more specifically emerging markets. This is a key issue considering the intensification of competition and decreasing margins prevalent in many western markets today. This thesis aims to ascertain how a multinational company should act in the event of extending its brand to an emerging market. We provide an extensive examination of theories regarding branding and brand management. However none of these provide a framework that can be useful to a company extending a brand to an emerging market. Brand theorists generally discuss many of the important concepts but have failed to create any type of structure, which relates them under this context. Therefore a primary objective of this thesis is to provide an integrated framework that companies can use to assess how they should adapt their brand management strategies to an emerging market. All aspects that we feel must be considered in the event of a geographical extension to an emerging market, have been incorporated into the framework and this includes both internal and external influences. The issue was examined on behalf of Volvo Construction Equipment, their operations in China being the focus point. In order to accurately assess how the company should act, Volvo Construction Equipment’s global brand management strategy has been examined in relation to the elements identified in our framework.