In the first part of this paper, we propose a uniform interpretation of characteristic classes as obstructions to the reduction of the structure group and to the existence of an equivariant extension of a certain homomorphism defined a priori only on a single fiber of the bundle. Afterwards, we define a family of invariants of principal bundles that detect the number of group reductions that a principal bundle admits. We prove that they fit into a long exact sequence of abelian groups, together with the cohomology of the base space and the cohomology of the classifying space of the structure group.