Is Your Brand Ready To Expand?

Take Our Brand Extension Quiz and Find Out!

Creative strategist, Mark Di Somma, and I wanted to build a framework that brand leaders could use to determine whether, if and how they should consider extending their brands. When we looked around at all the literature, there were shelves of books on growing your company presence, plenty on how to buy, sell and negotiate for existing brands and businesses, quite a few on franchising, some on licensing. There was also plenty of publicity around the kinds of deals that were being struck. But what was missing, it seemed to us, was a framework that people in charge of growing brands could use to expand their marque methodically and responsibly into a broader phenomenon. What was also missing were the strategic criteria for knowing when to do that in order to meet growth targets.

We realized that, at least more urgently, brand owners needed a tool to know if a brand is actually extendable.

For a brand to be extendable, we knew:

• The brand must have high top-of-mind awareness when a category is mentioned, which means consumers must actually name it when asked which brands are best in its class.
• The brand must command consumer loyalty, and is, therefore, something that people do not want to be without.
• Fans, enthusiasts and consumers must understand the brand and embrace what it stands for.
• The brand must achieve superior business results in its margin, sales growth and expandability.

Determining whether a brand meets each of the criteria listed above can be a quite cumbersome and time consuming, albeit a worthwhile, exercise that I address in my book, How To Tell If Your Brand Is Ready To Stretch Into New Categories.

For those of you looking for a quicker answer, like most of us, as to whether your brand is ready to extend or expand, I developed a fun little quiz. By answering seven simple questions, you will know whether your brand is ready to stretch into new categories. The scoring is not intended to be scientifically rigorous, but rather to give you a sense for the relative strength of your brand with its target.

When answering the questions below, don’t labor over each one. Rather, follow your gut and make an educated guess at the answer and assign an appropriate score. Mostly, have fun!