Truly Deeply/Madly

Build­ing your busi­ness through brand exten­sion
Dur­ing tough mar­ket con­di­tions, brand or prod­uct line exten­sions might just be the best way for your busi­ness to stay healthy, espe­cially if they’re not some­thing you spend much time think­ing about. When done right, brand exten­sions can either be a pos­i­tive way to build stronger and more prof­itable rela­tion­ships with your clients and cus­tomers. When done poorly, brand exten­sions can be expen­sive exper­i­ments that drain cash flow and con­fuse your market’s under­stand­ing of your busi­ness’ proposition.

Loy­alty and Trust
One of the great­est ben­e­fits of build­ing a strong brand is the loy­alty and trust that you build with your clients and cus­tomers. As pur­chasers of prod­ucts and ser­vices, peo­ple will always pre­fer to deal with some­one they have a trusted rela­tion­ship with, over form­ing a new rela­tion­ship with­out estab­lished trust. Adding a prod­uct or ser­vice offer­ing to your brand that is rel­e­vant to the needs of your cus­tomer can not only have a pos­i­tive effect on rev­enue, but also fur­ther enhance the rela­tion­ships your cus­tomers have with your brand.

Real estate agents extends them­selves
Mel­bourne real estate agent; Mar­shall White recently devel­oped a value-add ser­vice for clients prepar­ing their homes for sale — huge removal and self stor­age trail­ers. Parked out front of a house sport­ing an ‘upcom­ing auc­tion’ sign, the over-sized blue and gold trailer not only drew atten­tion to the house on behalf of the ven­dor, but also pro­vided a high traf­fic bill­board — all for the ben­e­fit of Mar­shall White.

We recently sold our house through Mar­shall White, hir­ing an off-site self-storage unit in the process. We not only invested a rea­son­able sum in doing that, but also hours of week­end time cart­ing our much loved (if lit­tle needed) house­hold junk over to the stor­age unit. Dur­ing the four months we had the unit, we vis­ited many times to retrieve the odd needed item, and then at the end of the process had to cart it all back again. This whole process would have been made immensely more sim­ple by the avail­abil­ity of a giant, secure trailer.

Which leads me to the six golden rules of brand exten­sion.
Golden Rule No.1 — Brand Align­ment
The uni­ver­sal mis­take com­mon to almost all failed Brand exten­sions; the new prod­uct or ser­vice did not relate directly and pos­i­tively to the busi­ness’ brand, it’s propo­si­tion, what it stood for in the minds of its mar­ket. When aligned with the val­ues and propo­si­tion of the brand, the prod­uct exten­sion is half way to being successful.

Golden Rule No.2 — Under­stand your Mar­ket
What would your cus­tomers and clients most value? What is it you could bring to their lives that would make the great­est pos­i­tive impact? The answers to this ques­tion most usu­ally lie in the behav­iors of your clients and cus­tomers either up-stream or down-stream from their inter­ac­tion with you and your busi­ness. By observ­ing, dis­cussing and under­stand­ing how and why your cus­tomers behave in the way they do will pro­vide all the gfround you need for iden­ti­fy­ing new prod­uct exten­sion ideas.

Golden Rule N0.3 — Research
What are your com­peti­tors doing? What are your peers in other mar­kets locally and abroad doing? What are the strongest trends impact­ing the lives of your cus­tomers. By spend­ing time on the inter­net inves­ti­gat­ing, you may just short-cut the whole process, at the worst you’ll be doing some use­ful com­peti­tor analysis.

Golden Rule No.4 — Brain­storm for Ideas
Get your team together (include every­one with an imag­i­na­tion), play back for them the research you have done, your tar­get mar­ket pro­file and their behav­iors. Throw the sub­ject open for dis­cus­sion and white-board the ideas.The more ideas the bet­ter, don’t dis­count any­thing at this stage of the process — many good ideas were binned before their poten­tial was identified.

Golden Rule No.5 — R&D
Assess the ideas for brand align­ment, cost to exe­cute, and brand pro­mo­tion and com­mer­cial poten­tial. List the best three ideas. If you have a large enough team, develop and exe­cute all three giv­ing one per­son respon­si­bil­ity for each. If your team is smaller, focus on the best idea only and develop that to exe­cu­tion before con­sid­er­ing your other ideas. Con­sider these brand exten­sions as prod­ucts that you can indi­vid­u­alise and package-up to own.

Golden Rule No.6 — Mar­ket like Crazy
Mar­ket your brand exten­sions to guess who? — your cur­rent clients and cus­tomers, old clients and cus­tomers and poten­tial clients and cus­tomers. Add the new prod­uct or ser­vice to your exist­ing mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing campaigns.

The unde­ni­able value of great brand exten­sion
Had Mar­shall White have had this brand exten­sion when we were mak­ing our deci­sion about which agent to engage to sell out house, they would have had an even greater point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. Just as impor­tantly, they would also have pock­eted the addi­tional rev­enue that we invested in another business.

If you’d like to get together with us to dis­cuss ideas for extend­ing the prod­uct and ser­vice of your brand, give us a shout.

Dave.

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, Corporate Image, Creative Ideas, Direct-marketing, Graphic Design Melbourne, Guerilla Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 7:46 am and is filed under Experiences, Small Brands Big Personalities, Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.