Comparing ingredient branding with incremental innovation in the case of food products

What is it about?

Both ingredient branding as well as incremental product innovations improve brand equity of parent brand. However, we noticed that, for low involvement product improvement is significantly better if incremental product innovation strategy is used instead of ingredient branding strategy. For high involvement products, we did not find any significant difference between both the strategies. Our results also suggest that when the host brand equity is low, marketer should use ingredient branding strategy and when parent brand equity is high, incremental product innovation strategy may be used to further enhance brand equity of host brand.

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Why is it important?

Within food product marketing, ingredient branding and incremental product innovations are often seen as complementary strategies that are aimed at building brand equity. Existing research doesn't give any guidelines on which strategy is the best strategy for a firm. In this paper, we have explicated that for low involvement products, ingredient branding is the better strategy and for high involvement products, both the strategies work equally efficiently. Also we found that when the parent brand is well known and highly regarded, incremental product innovations should be used, otherwise ingredient branding should be used to further improve the value of the product within the customer minds.