legalThere are certain clothing brands which can be found in the seconds market while other are not.
What are the reasons, brands do this? This is largely an unorganized sector. If one is planning to get into this field/ making this organized, what are the different factors should one look at? What could be the risks? How would one know if it is even legal?
That is called price differentiation or price discrimination. Those are pricing strategies, which mainly focus on the willingness pay. (Read this wikipedia article for the theoretical background.
There are many differences a product can have form another. Mostly it is just the name or the brand which is changed. (e.g. washing powder, food industry, juweliers, car industry etc.) And sometimes there is no difference at all, it is just the place or the distribution, which allows the the price differentiation (e.g. vaccines in the US and vaccines in Africa). Of course other things, like quality play a role too.
What is the reason, brands do this?
The main goal is to reach customers, you can't reach with your product. This will Maximize your Earnings and/or prevent competitors to enter your market.
In your special case, you focus on a brand strategy. Differentiation by Marketing. Think about it: There are people paying a lot of money to get the most newest, awesome, best shoes, just because the commercials tell them: "Those are way better, then the old one". Then there are people, which may look at quality, they don't buy the newest things, but they may buy an older version and not the cheapest. Maybe there are some other groups you want to reach, like "cheapest first", "ecological awareness" etc.
All those are only reachable by different products. Of course this only makes sense, if you the opportunity costs are lower then the gained benefit.
What factors?
Well you see, I listed many things already. So without information about you, your product and your goals, it is quite hard to give advice here.
Overall you have to think about these things: What is the customer segment of the "old" and the "new" product? What are there differences? Is the difference large enough, so your products don't excessively substitute each other?
Risks?
Same as previous, without further information its quite hard to tell. An awesome example is Harley Davidson. They had the problem with thier image. The "biker area" was over, so they tried to extent there product to younger customer groups. Not sure, if it was the marketing message or budget, but in the end, no one bought Harley Machines no more, because, for young people the brand was still not interesting and the rockers felt betrayed by their brand... But in the end, Harley did a great job. It was learning by doing.
I think the main risks are, - that your customer groups collide in any way. - the opportunity costs out weight the benefits. (it is a lot of additional work) - underestimation, path dependencies and wrong structure, while planing and executing
Legal?
In Germany there is the Cartel Office, which prevents artificial monopolies. But if you want such a thing to be illegal you really need market power (E-Bay and PayPal)
Of course, you can only do that with your own brands and products. You can't just make adidas shoes and say, "oh sorry, I just wanted to sell the to an other customer audience".
But, if you can offer adidas something, like an already existing distribution network, in an country, where adidas doesn't exists. That would be some kind of licencing strategy.
Does that answer this point?
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