Transferring Brand Value : from a traditional channel to a digital platform

Sammanfattning: As technology continues to affect the business sector, many companies have been faced with the nesessity of transformation. Adapting to a new, more Internet based society im-plies that companies are venturing into new market channels to get their products or ser-vices out to the consumers. Simultaneously as many companies are digitalizing, they are also launching or planning to launch brand extensions. Combining the two phenomenon’s we get a corporate situation that is vaguely explored, namely how a brand extension be-tween market channels work. Further more, how can value be transferred in this process? The purpose of this thesis is to further investigate the phenomenon described above and to gain more understanding about the new situation. Therefore, the authors have chosen to conduct an empirical investigation exploring how a company can transfer brand value to a new online product or service. This was done in cooperation with the company Eniro that recently have focused their efforts from their traditional printed market channel into a digital brand extension. During the study 15 in-depth interviews with small to medium sized companies were performed, and backed up with complementary communication with managers at Eniro. Four research questions were formulated to serve as a read thread throughout the work. The main aim was to evaluate brand equity of the traditional product to then compare if this brand equity had been transferred to the new online extension. After having performed the in depth interviews with representatives from the various companies, the authors could conclude that the original product of the printed directory with the company/person Gula Sidorna held stronger brand equity than the online exten-sion despite the company’s effort to promote the extension. The authors believe the rea-sons for this could be that during the process of extending the brand, some strategic deci-sions were made that did not enable the parent brand value to be transferred to the new extension. There were however value in the new extension in terms of simplicity and speed. Being able to quickly respond to the new and dynamic market where speed to market can be an important advantage was part of the positive associations for eniro.se. In the discussion regarding the main issue of transferring brand value to a digital platform the authors found that one of the most vital aspects is having clear communication within the organisation, sending out a clear message in marketing activities, not forgetting to emphasize reliability and stability to ensure that people in all ages feel inclined to use the digital product.