Strategies for Leveraging Master Brands: How to Bypass the Risks of Direct Extensions

Brand leveraging is a common practice today in product and services marketing. Many new brands are being especially developed as strategic platforms for later extensions. No longer do marketing managers ask whether or not to extend a brand--the primary question is how far can we reasonably stretch the brand.

Category extensions carry both opportunities and risks. On the one hand, they offer customers immediate brand recognition as well as the promise of benefits associated with a known brand. By stretching the brand to other products or services, a company can reinforce the brand's core associations, strengthen and expand the customer franchise, and build the overall business.

On the other hand, brands stretched too far (even if successful) risk diluting the core associations and eroding the customer base.

ASSESSING A BRAND'S STRETCH

In deciding how far to stretch a brand, specific knowledge of the boundaries of a brand's core associations is a key factor. But the question of how far to extend a brand overlooks the more fundamental question of how to extend a brand.

Many brand-leveraging efforts rely solely on one strategy: the direct extension of a brand across product categories. Such an exclusive focus puts many valuable brands at unnecessary risk and neglects other possible strategies for leveraging brands.

For example, research has shown that successful direct extensions of very strong brands are often limited to closely related product categories. The extraordinary strength of an existing brand association can interfere with customers' ability to learn the new associations needed for a successful category extension. In this article, we show how to bypass the risks of direct extensions by leveraging brands indirectly across product categories.

BRAND MEANING

The first task in brand leveraging is to determine the core associations evoked by the brand. In other words, what does the brand mean to customers?

Most brands evoke several types of associations. Figure 1 shows that a given brand is associated with categories having products bearing its name as well as with the usage situations for which it is appropriate. (Figure 1 omitted) Likewise, a brand may be associated with specific product attributes or customer benefits. Other types of brand associations include celebrity endorsers, sponsored events, geographic affiliations, user groups, etc.

For example, the brand Dove...