Porsche: The

Cayenne Launch
Anirban Mohanty | Aniruddha Deshpande |
Himanshu Shekher | Jayram Palnitkar | Parul Jain

Context
Porsche must consider how to position the
Cayenne while preserving its established brand
equity, which has historically been associated
with its sports cars
This problem has manifested itself in online
consumer-to-consumer conversations, such as
those on Rennlist, which have largely been
negative toward the Cayenne
Porsche must determine how much weight to
place on the opinions of its most loyal consumers,
whether these opinions will negatively affect
potential Porsche consumers associations and
Porsches brand equity, and the implications for
Porsches long-term strategy

Rennlist The Initial Response

Such communities tend to provide both negative and positive impact on the
brand image
Existence of strong online community adds an additional value and the
customers feel proud to be part of such fraternity discussing the issues and
positive feedback about the product
Also on the other side disapproval and disagreement is also shown
aggressively on such communities
Existence of such communities may sometimes hamper the introduction of new
product due to certain brand image and people not able to change it as
happened in case of Porsche
Members were completely against the idea of introduction of SUV and hence
criticized designs, manufacturing and engineering attributes of the product
These were the ultra-loyal customers that were very reluctant to change which
lead to brand strategy conflict but the company needs to decide whether to
take this into consideration or not as it represents a very small customer base

After Purchase Response

Cayenne owners were looked down by the earlier Porsche
owners and were even not allowed to join the clubs and
communities of Porsche owners
But the owners of Cayenne loved the vehicle and how the car
performed and they were against the criticisms which create
the divide between the owners of Porsche and Cayenne
But the company did not took into consideration all these
negative imaging of the brand and proceeded to launch the
vehicle, hence received severe criticism
In such a case it is important to note that the company
should not only take care of attracting new customers and
also take the old customers and their relation with the
company into consideration

Hostility

Rennlist posts
Half-brotherly treatment by the sports car owners
Comments on Personal and professional Blogs
Other online communities
Scathing remarks by the fans
Eventually started embracing the Cayenne
Should not affect porsches customer associations
Porsche is in the business of making fun cars
They should not have stuck to one particular
category so that they can leverage multiple
category based business
Diversification and risk mitigation

Brand extension Dos

and Don'ts