Brand and Product Management
What this domain tests
How brands build equity and how portfolios, architecture, extensions and new products are decided: Keller's customer-based brand equity, Aaker's equity components, brand architecture and cannibalization.
Core rules
- The CBBE ladder runs salience, then performance and imagery, then judgments and feelings, then resonance. Rungs cannot be skipped; resonance requires behavioural loyalty plus attachment.
- Aaker's components: awareness, associations, perceived quality, loyalty, proprietary assets.
- Architecture options are branded house, house of brands and endorsed. Match each to how far the parent's associations help or hurt.
- Extensions transfer equity only where perceived fit exists on attributes and usage situation.
- Always net out cannibalization and launch cost before endorsing an extension.
Worked example
A brand forecasts 40,000 units of a new line at contribution 20 per unit. Research says 30% of buyers would have bought the parent anyway, so incremental volume is 28,000 and incremental contribution 560,000. Launch cost of 900,000 gives payback in 900,000 / 560,000, about 1.6 years. Then add the risk the payback figure omits: a discount-positioned line can erode the parent's price premium, so the decision needs the dilution estimate too.
Traps
Equating awareness with equity; presenting brand valuation as strategy; ignoring cannibalization; extending into categories where the brand lacks credibility; treating correlated perceptual-map axes as independent; confusing mix width (number of lines) with depth (variants per line).