I always say to my children that you can’t go through life expecting to be the best at everything.
As we well know, this also applies to companies and brands. But this doesn’t stop some from straying into markets where they just don’t belong, markets where they’re simply unable to excel or bring the best of who they are.
We’ve seen this time and time again with bad brand extensions that just don’t make a whole lot of sense.
Some examples: Kellogg selling hip-hop street wear, Burger King marketing underwear and Playboy serving up energy drinks.
Those aren’t fictional examples, in case you’re wondering. They are among the worst brand extensions of 2008, according to a survey of Brandweek readers and marketing professionals.
What were those companies thinking? Or, better put perhaps, what were they smoking?
The scary thing is that these companies actually thought: “We just might make a go of this.”
I’m bewildered by some of the examples above, especially because we’re not talking about extensions within a related or broader market category.
Shouldn’t a brand extension have some logical relation to the essence of the core brand?
In my view, you need to know where your strengths lie. You need to know who you are and who you aren’t. You need to understand and accept that it’s okay not to be the best at everything.
Some of us just aren’t meant to market skivvies.
Do you have any examples of successful brand extensions in totally unrelated categories? If so, please share.
David, great topic and great post for (hopefully) a lively discussion.
What is especially interesting to me about brand extensions is that some marketers don’t seem to believe in them at all because it may dilute or weaken the “singular” aspect of a brand, but from a trademark legal perspective, brand extensions are wonderful because they actually broaden and strengthen the legal trademark rights underlying a brand. For more on this related topic, see my earlier DuetsBlog post here: http://www.duetsblog.com/2009/03/articles/branding/brand-strength-balancing-marketing-and-legal-perspectives/.
As to examples of questionable brand extensions (a/k/a/ “overbranding”), my colleague Dan Kelly has pondered Smith & Wesson’s foray from firearms into cologne and footwear, see
http://www.duetsblog.com/2009/03/articles/branding/overbranding-ii-when-have-you-stretched-your-brand-too-far/.
He has also questioned Swiss Army Knife’s extension to luggage, here: http://www.duetsblog.com/2009/03/articles/branding/overbranding-can-you-dilute-your-own-brand/.
One successful example of a brand extension would be the virgin group where Richard Branson has leveraged the strength of the brand to enter into new and completely unrelated markets. For e.g Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Mobile are completely unrelated… but both of them have been able to differentiate itself from the competition by capturing value is not done by the existing players…