I was looking at a sale recently that had SD cards for sale. Of course, people usually try and buy items from brands that they recognize as the assumption is that it will work better than a lesser known brands. Interestingly enough, one brand of SD cards was a Duracell brand. Immediately for myself, when I hear that name I think of batteries. Interestingly too, when it came to the SD cards I was able to read comments such as how people didn’t want to by a “no-name” brand.
Funny when you think about it as it isn’t really a no-name considering that is a huge company where it would seem they are just trying to expand the types of products that they offer. Reminds me of a story before where in a company sales training a person was telling me that their company had a line up of Samsung Cell phones but no one would be comfortable in buying them. To the public, it was simply a no-name brand where the company could go out of business tomorrow.
Therefore, to get through that hurdle the sales people had to actually start educating people about the brand history first. For example, it was a completely different story when you talked about televisions as it was definitely a recognizable brand in that field. So they used that as a way to build a reputation of sort for the brand so that people would not judge it in a bias way. Sure enough, it worked and people started to seriously compare it with the more established brands in the field.
I suppose if you are expanding like that too there is no reason not to try and leverage your past successes. You can’t just assume that people will automatically recognize you in the same way without emphasizing it.