Q: How can I create successful brand extensions?

A: Brand extensions can leverage a brand’s assets and equity by marketing new products or services. While this strategy offers significant strengths to brand extensions, significant risks can arise in diluting or severely damaging the brand. Typical brand extensions include basic line additions within the same segment—from Coke to Vanilla Coke, for example.

Many brand managers believe it makes sense to “transfer” the promise and equity of their established brand to another product. But that isn’t always true. In fact, many companies go too far in trying to extend their brand to products or services that are a poor fit and risk losing credibility in their flagship brands in the process.

The key to successful brand extensions is determining that those proposed are consistent with the brand’s core values. Not from the marketing department’s point of view, but from the consumer’s point of view.

Consumer research should yield the following information about brand extensions: their understanding of the brand’s core attributes, their ideas about which kinds of products or services are logical and are consistent with those values, their view that the brand extension is credible and acceptable, and their perception that the core brand can be transferred to the specific product or service extension(s) in question.

—Ted Mininni, President
Design Force Inc. , Marlton, NJ

—Arline Wall, Toy Industry Consultant & Former Global Brand Director, Toys R Us