What factors should you consider before extending your brand?

Let me add as an agency owner with Branding experience that your brand vision is not your personal vision. What is good for your brand isn't what you think. It's not a YOU thing. It's more of a what do I want my TARGET audience to think and feel.

A brand's distinctiveness extends beyond its logo, tagline, and visual elements. Inadequate differentiation often results from a weak foundational framework. Have you clearly defined your brand's voice, journey, and values? Moreover, are these aspects effectively communicated to your audience? Evaluate whether your messages and brand content authentically convey these elements. Develop comprehensive brand guidelines to ensure consistency across your team, aligning everyone to showcase the uniqueness of your brand.

Extending your brand is a strategic decision that involves careful consideration of various factors to ensure a successful and sustainable expansion. Before embarking on brand extension, it's crucial to thoroughly evaluate the potential opportunities, risks, and implications to make an informed choice.

When a brand is uniquely relevant and produces unforgettable experiences, it becomes powerfully magical. Having said this, everything about it has to be alligned: from its DNA, to its properties and delivery.

Our brand's vision and values define us. New offerings must align with these principles to maintain trust and loyalty, ensuring consistent quality and customer satisfaction.

More than often when I consult a brand that is actually not doing great initially they want to be relatable to everyone, and there is the reason they are not relatable to anyone. When you talk to everyone you talk to no one. Treat your brand as a doctor who is there to solve a problem your audience is facing. The product/service you serve must be a part of a solution. You can not have a solution searching for a problem. You do want to serve?

Our brand's growth relies on knowing our target market and their needs. Thorough research informs our entry into new markets, ensuring our products meet expectations and enhance our brand image.

If your brand isn't good enough, you're not tight enough with your audience Get closer to: their world. their needs. their passions. their fantasies. their problems. getting your hands dirty. filtering reality from noise. analysing them in and out. testing out 1000 different systems. not getting crushed by the failures. finding that needle in the haystack. positioning yourself as their confidant. twisting the whole business on its head.

Look beyond demographics and psychographics. Focus on the "jobs to be done" framework. Understand not just who your customers are, but why they buy. What job is your product or service hired to do? This deep understanding can lead to more impactful brand extensions that resonate on a functional and emotional level.

Perspective on considering target market and customer needs: - Before extending, deeply mine insights on user journeys - map motivation, barriers, brand touchpoints across the expansion area. - Unpack who stands to benefit most from this stretch. Will it dilute or enhance affinity with existing customer base? - Evaluating fit involves studying competitive forces and unique value-adds you can layer on. How will this differentiate? - Truly addressing needs and frictions takes empathy and cocreation with the audiences you aim to now serve. Did their voices shape this?

It is always said that the whole world does not have enough budget for marketing teams. Marketing teams tend to splurge, on campaigns, so you should be very clear on the KPIs targetted of the campaigns, and very specific with your target audiences.

Before embarking on brand extension, you must consider evaluating your resources and capabilities, which serve as the essential enablers for successful extension and innovation. Assess the financial, human, and technical resources at your disposal, considering their adequacy to support the brand extension strategy. Factor in potential costs and risks associated with the extension, and evaluate operational and logistical aspects, including distribution channels, supply chain, marketing mix, and customer service. A thorough understanding of your resources and capabilities ensures efficient planning and execution of the brand extension strategy, helping you navigate potential pitfalls and obstacles that may impede success.

of all the 5 steps, this is the most crucial. Having an understanding of what you can do with current capabilities and what you need for doing more is the first step when working on brand extensions. This does not mean just the quantity of work to be done but also the type. Your current system may not work for the extended brand, you will need to design a strategy relevant to the extension. You may need fresher perspective and time to build those capabilities.

When possible, businesses should grow brand extensions by looking to grow profitability by being able to sell "waste" byproducts of an existing product, i.e. selling kerosine after creating diesel or gasoline. This will decrease the cost and amount of resources needed for expansion and can offset other costs in the production process.

Our brand extension depends on our resources and capabilities. Assessing finances, human assets, and technical strengths guides our strategy, ensuring efficient execution and success while addressing potential challenges.

As a brand, you can not go and change your product entirely and innovate from scratch, but you can't be stagnant with your product or services. Evolve! Evolve with the trends, and markets, and incorporate the advancements in your brand. Secondly, presenting your brand in an innovative way is always the way to go and easier than changing the core product or service. It may not be possible to innovate with the product, but you can always innovate the idea how you present your brand.

Best differentiator? Storytelling It's a means of distinguishing your business from the competition. It employs a narrative to connect your brand to consumers, emphasizing tying what you stand for to the values you share with your customers. It's a tale that not only explains to consumers what the brand is all about but also endears them to the brand. The usage of brand stories is prevalent in branding and marketing. A brand may associate itself with an organization to boost its public image and demonstrate its commitment to social justice.

One need only to look at Budweiser to appreciate that not all new products should fall under the same brand. While Bud Light was being boycott, Corona was doing well because general beer consumers did not realize that Corona was part of the Budweiser family. Sometimes, it makes more sense to create a new brand inside of the family of brands more so than adding new products that don't align with the existing brand.

Our brand's strength lies in innovation and differentiation. We create unique, valuable products, communicated through branding elements, attracting and retaining customers for a competitive edge.

Considering that products and services are often quickly imitated, I think the focus should be on creating a unique customer experience that is hard to replicate. This could involve unique customer service approaches, innovative use of brand touchpoints, or creating a community around the product or service.

Perspective on feedback and evaluation: - Before any launch, aggressively prototype concepts then observe user interactions in the wild. - What delights? Where do they stumble? Quantitative and qualitative feedback should directly shape final designs. - Establish clear metrics frameworks spanning commercial KPIs as well as brand health indices to gauge extension reception. - Audit not just sales but equity via surveys - did alignment, relevance and affinity among existing customers remain intact? - Immerse into social conversations to detect sentiment momentum early. Monitor leading indicators before lagging ones. - Keep rapid iteration cycles alive post-launch too by continued check-ins with your community.

In the 1980s, Colgate, the renowned oral care brand, took a surprising turn by diversifying into frozen foods, including lasagna. Despite their reputation for toothpaste, this move aimed to expand their product line. However, consumers found it perplexing to connect a brand associated with mouth cleanliness to frozen cuisine. The disconnect between a brand known for oral hygiene and the world of frozen dinners highlighted the risks of venturing too far from a brand's established identity. Consequently, Colgate strategically decided to retract from the frozen food market, emphasizing the critical need to align brand extensions with consumer perceptions.

Feedback and evaluation guide our brand extension. Testing with customers and measuring performance through metrics help us learn, adapt, and improve our strategy and innovation.

Iterative Improvement: Establish mechanisms for ongoing feedback and evaluation. Regularly assess how well the brand extension is performing and be willing to make adjustments based on customer feedback and market dynamics. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define measurable KPIs to gauge the success of the brand extension. This could include sales figures, customer satisfaction scores, and market share metrics

The best way to find new markets is to habe a closer look and analysis about your consumers. What are their needs and motives. Next step would be to find markets that add value to the needs and the products that I offer already with my brand that I’m planning to stretch.

Tu atributo de valor, lo que hace diferente a tu marca de las demás. Siempre hay que preguntarse que nos hace especiales o distinguidos frente al resto de las marcas del mercado. Tu comunicación es diferente? usas formatos nuevos? Te caracteriza el precio? el servicio? usas AI?. Antes de extender tu marca es clave analizar tu plan de marketing y asegurarte de que todas las bases principales estén correctamente establecidas.

Essentials for success: Maintain strong, consistent branding and provide a detailed, user-friendly corporate design manual for clear guidance.