B2B brand extension to the B2C market-The case of the ICT industry in Taiwan

Brand extension has been recognised as a strategic asset by most companies. Faced with razor-thin margin pressures, many Asian companies are seeing the eminence of extending their successful business-to-business (B2B) brands to the business-to-consumer (B2C) market. In this paper we examine the role of the perceived fit between a parent B2B brand and its extension product. We apply the Aaker and Keller's consumer evaluation model with the residual-centring technique to empirically assess the fit extension. The investigated B2B parent brands investigated here include four electronics companies in Taiwan that total more than 50 per cent of the information communication technology manufacturing capacity worldwide. Our results show that the consistency of brand concepts between the parent B2B brand and the B2C extension product is the dominant factor influencing consumer evaluations. Consumers tend to have high evaluations of extended products when the parent brands have (1) high-quality perceptions; (2) high perceived innovativeness; and (3) high capability in transferring skills or assets. This corroborates previous consumer evaluation research on B2C brand extension.