If you’re a person, you can have many different facets to who you are. You can be a warm and caring husband and father to your spouse and kids. You can be an authoritative and decisive manager at work. You can be a gregarious, hail-fellow-well-met dude with your friends. In short, you can easily be different things to different people.
But for a brand, it’s a whole different story.
All too often, a successful brand with a well-defined, focused position in people’s minds has given in to believing it can broaden its appeal without sacrificing anything. Surely, it’s okay to think “hey, if we’ve stood for X all of these years, it’s not THAT big of a leap to include Y to attract more business and customers,” right?
Wrong. The problem with thinking that you are broadening your brand is that you’re really not broadening it—you’re diluting it. Your loyal customers and like-minded prospects who want to be part of the brand that engaged them and provided something to aspire to will now see your newer, broader brand as something that is less focused on what was so attractive previously. In their eyes, you’re taking a step away from not only your values, but their values as well.
Look at Mercedes-Benz. For most of its history, it was the foremost luxury car brand in the world. No other auto manufacturer could touch its intelligent design, prestige, and quality—its tagline of “Engineered Like No Other Car in the World” spoke the truth. It was the car for highly successful, wealthy people and if the masses couldn’t afford it, well, that was the point.
So when Mercedes began putting more effort into producing lower priced, more “approachable” cars in the late 90’s, its core audience immediately began looking elsewhere for the exclusivity it wanted. To compound the problem, the quality and reliability of Mercedes’ entire line nosedived significantly over the years, while those same aspects of other luxury brands like Lexus and Acura remained among the industry’s highest. Mercedes is trying to reclaim its once impeccable reputation (with the recent tag of “The Best or Nothing) among luxury car buyers. But given today’s crowded field of premium brands that enjoy the kind of reputation that Mercedes owned outright years ago, it looks to be a difficult task.
MTV is another monster brand that has lost its way. Once a visionary brand that essentially invented its own category, MTV today is galaxies away from its music roots. What was an innovative platform for showcasing new music and artists and celebrating music legends has become essentially a shock TV network. Instead of providing young people with a way to feed and expand their passion for music, MTV mainly offers programming focused on sex, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol use, and other staples of daytime talk/reality-based shows. So why is it still called Music Television?
Great brands deeply understand what they are about AND what they aren’t. Harley Davidson knows that its brand isn’t about two-wheeled transportation. It’s about freedom, and living life on your own terms. Five Guys Burgers & Fries knows that its brand is all about simple, homemade taste—and not about staying current with salads, wraps, and health-conscious options that large fast food chains have added to their menus.
The willingness to sacrifice increased popularity and appeal for short-term gain is a key part of keeping your brand strong. Most companies can usually identify the unique thing that they stand for; the hard part is sticking to it. The ones that do will have a brand that prevails over time, trendiness, and most importantly, irrelevance.