KEY POINTS:
Fisher & Paykel has stepped onto a marketing tightrope, rebranding a big part of its New Zealand output as "Elba" while preserving the old Fisher & Paykel brand for top-end products.
Those products - including top-of-the-line washing machines and dishwashers - make up the bulk of the overseas sales planned to be a big part of the firm's growth strategy.
Standard or "everyday" products are focused on New Zealand.
The company says the transition is necessary because the Fisher & Paykel brand was being required to cover too many products and brand values. The Elba-branded products have the additional tagline "by Fisher and Paykel".
The change is unlikely to have much impact on overseas sales, but it is significant for this country where Fisher & Paykel has been named New Zealand's third-most-trusted brand.
While the marketing revamp coincides with the controversial shift of production abroad, F&P says it has been planned for a long time.
Television commercials for the new brand have the understated tagline that the products "do what they are supposed to".
Elba is being positioned as a "genuine and honest brand" but separate from the quality branding of Fisher & Paykel, while retaining customer service and after-sales service.
Shoppers will find that while stainless steel and other top-end products retain the Fisher and Paykel badge, other products will be branded as Elba by Fisher and Paykel.
There are subtleties to the change.
The TV commercials fail to mention the F&P tagline - designed to retain the strong customer loyalty and brand recognition for F&P. But the company says the F&P brand is so strong that if it were included in Elba it would overwhelm the new brand.
"We are taking a bob each way," says New Zealand chief operating officer Malcolm Harris.
The other subtlety is that the company says some of the Elba products were actually made by other manufacturers, as has been the case when all products were marketed under the F&P brand.
A company spokesman said outsourcing material was common in whiteware and there were no issues for people who bought products because of their Fisher & Paykel branding. He said the outsourced products were a small part of the company's line.
While the company is increasingly concentrating on its international markets, the high-wire acts marks significant change for the firm that claims a 50 per cent share of the New Zealand whiteware market.
Sales and marketing director Craig Douglas said there was space in the market for a genuine, honest brand.
He noted that up until the mid-1990s F&P products had been marketed as separate brands such as Kelvinator or Frigidaire.
The company started manufacturing its "everyday products" in January and consumers would now find all of them carry the Elba brand.
Market researcher Jonathan Dodd of Synovate said the dual branding made sense and had been done before - one example being Lexus as the premium brand for Toyota.
The brand transition is complicated with Elba already an established whiteware brand for cookers in European and Asian markets. Fisher & Paykel bought the Italian whiteware company three years ago.
