hat is a stronger brand name: Kodak, American Express, Mercedes, Ford or IBM? Why is a brand strong or weak? How do brand strength levels change over time? Why? How do brand strengths vary by country and markets and why? Such questions are fascinating and also practical. Most businesses, if they measure brand equity at all, restrict their measures to brands in the immediate product class and market of interest. Expanding the perspective to include multiple product classes and markets can have significant practical value in that it can enhance a firms capability to manage a portfolio of brands and markets, benchmark against the best, and develop a valid brand equity measurement system. Managing a Portfolio of Brands and Markets-Many organizations offer a number of brands across a variety of markets. If these brands are managed separately and independently or on an ad hoc basis, overall resource allocation among the brands may be less than optimal. For example, if Grand Metropolitan, which owns a host of worldwide brands including J&B, Bailey's, Smirnoff, Pillsbury, Green Giant, Hagen-Dazs, and Burger King, does not treat its brands and their markets as a cohesive portfolio, then strategic decisions made for the benefit of individual brands might in the end hurt the company's overall performance. Good management of a portfolio of brands and markets starts with having common measures of performance. Of course, well-developed and

Two studies were conducted to obtain insights on how consumers form attitudes toward brand extensions, (i.e., use of an established brand name to enter a new product category). In one study, reactions to 20 brand extension concepts involving six well-known brand names were examined. Attitude toward the extension was higher when (1) there was both a perception of “fit” between the two product classes along one of three dimensions and a perception of high quality for the original brand or (2) the extension was not regarded as too easy to make. A second study examined the effectiveness of different positioning strategies for extensions. The experimental findings show that potentially negative associations can be neutralized more effectively by elaborating on the attributes of the brand extension than by reminding consumers of the positive associations with the original brand.

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