At a stretch

If there is a downside to presenting strong brand health metrics to leadership it is that the response is likely to be a good deal more challenging than a quietly articulated ‘well done’. Homing in on those stellar awareness scores, that dominant market share, that brand trust number to die for, leadership pushes marketing to do more.

Any hint of discomfort on your face will be quickly waved aside. No, no, no, this isn’t about nudging those metrics higher from an already high base. This isn’t about near-impossible incremental improvement. This is about taking this strong brand to pastures new. With data like this, the top team will demand to know, why aren’t we looking at brand stretch?

Now brand stretch is one of those marketing concepts that is very loosely defined, if it is ever defined at all. To some it means a new line extension or a move into adjacent market space. To others it means adventuring into a distant, unrelated sector in which the brand has zero experience. To leadership, it tends to mean ‘think big’. And that counts double if your leaders happen to be venture capital backers. Those guys haven’t got where they are today by staying parochial. Urgency, daring and plunder are in their blood.

But perhaps not in yours. Still, you need to at least start to think about where this nice brand of yours might replant itself, and what the pros and cons might be of thinking well outside category boundaries. There must surely be some evidence out there to show what is possible and what is frankly crazy.

There is, but as so often in marketing that evidence points all over the map, with examples of brands that have tried and wildly succeeded and brands that have tried just as hard and fallen flat on their face.

Posterchild for boundary-defying freedom is Virgin, with its seemingly effortless slalom from music to airlines to broadband to banking. Red Bull gets a special mention, too, for its brand odyssey from weird tasting energy drink to digital media colossus, with Formula 1 ownership and now a promising functional fashion label coming along for the ride.

This is inspiring stuff but, wisely, you are careful to look at negative cases before getting too carried away. Immediately, two interesting brands crop up: Virgin and Red Bull. The former for its failed forays into wedding dresses and cola, the latter for the noisy launch and quiet withdrawal of its LunAqua water and energy shots.

The Red Bull case is especially intriguing, as you’d expect the brand to succeed in sectors that were closer to its core offer, where its credibility would have been unquestioned. Instead, the less proximate ventures were the ones that made it. The harder you look, the more puzzling it all gets.

Blue sky thinking

There is a temptation, when considering stories like these, to conclude that highly portable brands are kind of one-offs, where a buccaneering spirit was encoded in their original DNA, for good or bad, and not the sort of thing that more grounded brands should attempt.

At which point the evidence base turns up the example of Caterpillar. Here is a venerable US business with a 100-year history of developing and building colossal earth-moving machines, which in the early 1990s takes its brand into workwear, with huge success. Yes, ‘work’ is encoded in both cases, but even so, this is an impressive leap.

Certainly, it would be hard to imagine it the other way around, where managers of a successful brand in workwear think to themselves one day, ‘Hey, maybe we should start making diggers and earth movers and stuff’. That really does sound crazy.

In which case, use it as a potential ‘blue sky’ example in that brainstorm you are planning on breaking out of your self-imposed category prison.

You’ll certainly need something to, well, stretch minds and get team members to open out to brave new possibilities. Even when invited to think of literally any market space to take their brand into, with a completely open brief and the usual workshop moratorium on instant judgement, it’s surprising how often teams either stick close to where the brand is today or come up with nothing at all.

Eventually, though, ideas go down, and one captures imaginations sufficiently to get taken seriously. Size-of-prize analyses will be undertaken, and if the numbers look promising, marketers will typically move their thinking forward under two headers: right to play and right to win.

It’s not that these are terrible prompts, more that they reflect an odd mix of caution and hubris. No brand needs a right to play. Any brand is free to seek to improve customer offers in an unrelated category. Marketers feel they need brand credibility to take them across the divide, but that credibility is scant at the outset and will eventually derive from performance in the new sector itself. For 70 years Yamaha was a maker of musical instruments. Then it was a maker of motorbikes, which it executed superbly. Today it has credibility in both.

As for ‘right to win’ – if only.

So, better to sweep aside all talk of rights, and focus on the single most important thing that will improve the brand’s chances in its new market space: how the eventual substantive offer will in some way outperform the incumbent brands already there.

The point is that while brand appeal might get you a foothold, it is never enough on its own to power lasting success. This was the reality that undid Unilever’s attempt to take its Lynx fragrance brand into razors in the early 2000s. Consumers were happy about the brand stretch. But the blades were never up to it. ‘We didn’t have the metal bashing skills’ was the marketing director’s laconic comment at the time.

Well, that’s not a mistake you would make. But with the best will in the world, failure is a real and present possibility, even as you throw everything at success. For every Caterpillar, Yamaha and Virgin Media there is an LunAqua, Lynx Razors and Virgin Cola, where some combination of bad luck, unfortunate timing, miscalculation or pure consumer perfidy prompts a chastened withdrawal.

It’s this reality that puts many marketing leaders off bold cross-category development. Not just the potential loss of the resources deployed in the new venture, and the black hole in the CV where two years’ work have gone, but the worry that failure over there in that new market space will affect the health and reputation of the brand in its home sector.

This kind of worry is natural but overdone. If, as we now widely accept, brands aren’t really that important in the lives of consumers, and they don’t have our every move on their radars, you can be sure that they will not retain any consciousness of failure for long.

Going for growth

What’s obvious is that brand stretch is a high risk, high reward marketing strategy. What’s equally obvious is that if your brand is already dominant in its market sector, soaraway growth – the kind leadership looks for – is not going to be achieved organically.

Still, you’d wish leadership could be a bit more nuanced in its demands to seek new market space. Isn’t this another example of how they don’t ‘get’ marketing, how they misunderstand both the integrity and fragility of brands, how they issue blunt diktats with no real grasp of the subtleties and trade-offs involved?

Perhaps. But with growth a chimera in a challenging commercial world, and marketers too slow and cautious to seize the entrepreneurial opportunities staring them in the face, this might be one of those occasions where leadership, annoyingly, is right.