In today’s world market, due to technological development and functional standardization of products, it is becoming more difficult for products to establish their own differentiation. It is also caused by new products and similar products subsequen...
In today’s world market, due to technological development and functional standardization of products, it is becoming more difficult for products to establish their own differentiation. It is also caused by new products and similar products subsequently manufactured and released to the market. Under this circumstance, it is becoming more important for companies to show their competitiveness in the market by using their own differentiated brand image. The importance of differentiated brand identity also applies to the lighting market.
It is because the rapid development of lighting technology has resulted in the production of not only a variety of new products equipped with new technologies but also low-priced products that are similar.
The lighting manufacturers have changed their priority from simple life functional lighting systems which light up the work environment and residential space in the past to the current emotional lighting which reflects people’s lifestyle, preference and aesthetic value added to the life functional lighting.
To establish a differentiated identity, the lighting manufacturers exhibit their story and history through various internal visual media and communication means and through museums or showrooms which have become the spaces for brand expansion experience in order to provide people with the education and cultural art program related to their brands. These corporate cultural marketing strategies constitute long-term cultural marketing which transfers the culture and value of positive brand to other people rather than simply selling products to people. So, this study focuses on the strategy of strengthening brand identity in the extension space for the lighting manufacturers, such as showrooms and museums where people can experience the history and culture of lighting. For this purpose, the concept of brand identity and the theory on brand extension were studied. Then, 4 domestic lighting manufactures and 4 overseas lighting manufacturers were selected which provide people with their lighting manufacturers’ extension experience space such as corporate museum or showroom to analyze the brand identity’s semantic factors and visual expression and the brand identity’s expression factors inside the showroom or museum which is the space for experiencing the corporate brand.
The analysis of the domestic and overseas lighting manufacturers’ brand identity has projected the IT company’s image which put priority on technology and specialty by using sans serif in the type of logo which is the visual expression and made of consistent solid color. In addition, the overseas precedence cases showed that most of them adopt the abstract or factual type of lighting inside their symbol marks. So, for better understanding of the direction of brand identity of emotional lighting’s extension space (showroom or museum), the visual identity of the lighting manufacturers’ brand has been analyzed through Bernd H. Schumitt’s aesthetics style methodology (brand complexity, brand expression, brand moving, and brand intensity). As a result, the feelux lighting company was selected because it has less intensity with the use of serif font and because it does not show any lighting color and characteristics even though it is just an emotional lighting company unlike the lighting companies which also manufacture other products. The lighting museum, which is the space for experiencing the Feelux lighting manufacturer’s brand extension, is a space for experiencing the emotional lighting and it also shows the coexistence between the lighting cultures such as light art museum, lighting playground and the arts. So, rebranding was conducted for the construction of the brand identity for Feelux Lighting Museum which clearly exposes the coexistence between the form of emotional lighting and the light art. It is expected that this study would help lighting manufacturers to introduce differentiated human-focusing brand identity in the lighting museum in the future and that this study would become the leading case for the construction of differentiated emotional lighting brand.