General Motors Brand Extension

General Motors Brand Extension

Name

Institution

General Motors Brand Extension

        General Motors Corporation is an American multinational that specializes in the design, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing vehicles as well as their parts. The company’s headquarters are located in Detroit, and it manufactures vehicles in more than 35 countries (Sloan, 2014). The company is one of the most successful automobile manufactures, having sold 10 million vehicles in 2016 (Pope, 2016). Some of its brands include Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, and Buick. With its already successful name, the company can extend its brand, and venture into the production of wireless chargers, whose demand is on the rise due to the increased use of smartphones.

Methodology

Type of Research 

The type research that is employed in this project both qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative research will be aimed at understanding General Motors’ current position in the automobile industry, as well as the current state of the wireless chargers market. The qualitative research will also investigate the various strengths that General Motors has, which would be instrumental in enabling the corporation to succeed in the wireless charging market. It will also explore the various opportunities that are available in the wireless charging market. Moreover, the research will also involve the use of questionnaires, which will issued to a given number of consumer electronics in the united states. The questionnaires will also be given to various experts in both the automobile industry and the wireless charging industry, and they will assist in understanding the consumers perceptions of the general electric brand, and what their probable perceptions of the brands wireless chargers.

Sampling Method 

The research sampling technique in the study will be random sampling, aimed at obtaining results that are more scientific, thus representative of the entire population. A list of wireless charging experts as well as automobile industries will be will be acquired online, from platforms such as LinkedIn and industry organizations. The respondents will be contacted first, to seek for their permission to administer the questionnaires to them. With their consent, questionnaire will be sent to their emails, details of how to fill it out. Consent will also be sought from various stores that sell wireless chargers, to issue their experts with questionnaires regarding the subject.
Respondents

The respondents in the study will be from all the states in the United states, since it is the largest market for the wireless chargers, as well as the largest market for General Motors products. Besides, the researcher chose the United States because of the social and economic conditions that are present in the country presently, which is relevant to the study and as it fits the time and resources constraints of the researcher. The researcher will seek for consent from the randomly selected respondents and request them to respond to the questionnaire until the required amount of respondents, 100, is reached. Expert opinions will also be sought in this research to offer explanations regarding the response from the respondents, with regard to their perceptions of wireless charging systems that could be manufactured by General Motors.
Questionnaire 

The questionnaire will require information on the respondents’ social, economic, and demographic background, as well as their perceptions towards General Motors’ products. The questionnaire will also include details of what the responds look for when buying wireless chargers, what improvements they would like to see in the existing products, and their perceptions towards the products that are already in the market.

Brand Extension

        Brand extension refers to when companies leverage on the success of their brand, when the particular brand has achieved as substantial level value and equity in that it has a place in the minds of the consumers (Batra, Lenk, & Wedel, 2010). Brand extension may take various forms, which may include line extension or category extension. Line extension refers to when a company introduces new products in the same category as the parent brand (Lee, Monroe, & Rosa, 2015). On the other hand, category extension refers to when a company introduces products that are in different categories than the parent categories (Spiggle, Nguyen, & Caravella, 2012). Corporations extend their brands for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons is the fact that it is relatively less expensive to introduce a  product under a known and respected brand, than to introduce a totally new brand (Batra, Lenk, & Wedel, 2010). Introducing a new brand would require extensive marketing and advertising to develop perception and recognition about the brand. However, by extending a brand, the consumers already recognize it, and have perceptions towards it, thus less advertising and marketing is required (Spiggle, Nguyen, & Caravella, 2012). A familiar brand name converses messages to the customers easily, since they already have connections with the brand.

        Furthermore, a well-planned brand extension can benefit from the halo effect, in that the established products brand promise and image are transferred to the brand extension automatically (Batra, Lenk, & Wedel, 2010). This, in return, positions the brand extension better, thus increasing its chances of succeeding. Moreover, an extended brand can be beneficial to the parent brand through by creating a  greater sense of loyalty, as well as reiterating the brand’s promise as well as the consumers’ perceptions towards the brand (Spiggle, Nguyen, & Caravella, 2012). This assists in sustaining the parent brands relevance in the eyes of the consumers. Therefore, considering that General Motors Company is successful in the automobile and the financial services industry, it can leverage on its success to introduce a new product category, thus manufacture the wireless chargers.

Wireless Charger Industry Overview

        The wireless chargers market was valued at $3 billion as at 2016, and it is projected that it will grow to more than $24.05 billion by 2023 (Liang & Zhuang, 2015). This is a clear indicator that the industry steadily expanding, which gives General Motors an opportunity to tap into it, and cement itself as the preferred manufacturer of wireless chargers. The growing demand for smart phones is causing the expansion of the industry, with the consumer electronics segment accounting for 31.53% of the wireless charging market, and smartphones accounting for 51.46% of the total wireless chargers industry consumption (Laura, 2016). Furthermore, the increasing disposable income increase globally leads to the increased expenditure on electronic devices, which includes the purchase of tablets, smartphones, and wearable devices. As at 2016, the total shipment of smartphones was 1.5 billion units, and it is expected that the shipments will increase to more than 2 billion units by 2023 (Pope, 2016). Therefore, once can see that the industry is steadily growing, which would result in increased demand for the wireless chargers.