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How to Brand a Next-Generation Product

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How to Brand a Next-Generation Product
When Apple launched its latest iPad, experts and nonexperts alike expected it to be dubbed "iPad 3," a natural follow-on to the second-generation iPad 2. Instead, the company called the new iPad just that: "the new iPad." Observers debated whether this was lazy branding or a very deliberate effort to market the iPad as a sibling to the Mac. Macs keep their names with each successive upgrade, analysts noted, while iPhones sport sequential numbers and letters to indicate improvements.
Like Apple, most consumer-centric companies deal with the dilemma of how to brand the next- generation of an existing product. Product upgrades make up the majority of corporate research and development activity. That's why Harvard Business School marketing professors John T. Gourville and Elie Ofek were surprised to find a dearth of academic research on the subject. "There's a lot of research about new-product branding, but as best as we could tell, nobody had looked closely at the issue of how to brand a successive generation," Gourville says.
To that end, Gourville and Ofek teamed up with London Business School professor Marco Bertini (HBS DBA '06) to suss out the best practices for branding next-generation products.
"For managers, this is not a trivial decision," Ofek says. "Consumers don't necessarily read specs to learn about new features, but they'll always notice a new name. We thought we could come in and bring some guidelines and normative implications that were well grounded in academic research."
Many companies choose either the sequential naming approach (Sony's successive PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3 video game consoles, for example) or the complete name change approach (Nintendo's Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii). The professors conducted a series of experiments to determine when and why each approach made the most

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