Chapter 20 Fit and Leverage in Brand Extensions Edward M. Tauber Tauber Research IF YOU COULD SEE HER THROUGH MY EYES ‘When you look at me standing here today, you see someone very different from what I see when I think about myself. You may see a short guy with glasses who is a marketing researcher, but I know that I play guitar in a rock-and-roll band! In fact, I know millions of things about myself that you cannot know. Asa result, there is a huge gap between what you perceive about me and what I perceive about myself. This is the essence of brand extension research. The company that makes a product has one database from which it perceives its brands; the consumer has a far different and more personalized data base that he or she uses to form impressions about these brands. Our role as researchers is to help management understand their brands through the eyes of the consumer. Without exception, in every brand extension study I have ever conducted, there has always been a huge difference between what management believed the consumer thought and what the consumer actually thought about their brands. THE CONCEPTS OF FIT AND LEVERAGE A brand can successfully be extended to new categories only if: (a) the con- sumer believes the brand is a logical fit, and (b) the brand conveys some benefit wanted in the new category—what I call /zverage. In my experience, some brands 313314 TAUBER cannot be extended at all; very few have broad extension potential and most can be extended to a very limited number of categories. The limitations that restrict a brand’s extension are varied: 1. Some brands are tied so closely to a product or product class that the con- sumer rejects the name on anything else. A Coke is a soft drink—period. 2. Some brands convey a narrow or special expertise from the company that manufactures them. This precludes the brand from having credi- bility in other areas. Hershey makes chocolate. Anything not chocolate is not Hershey. 3. Some brands own attributes or benefits that are tied to the parent product. For example, anything with the Clorox name on it probably can’t be delicate or mild. Anything from Contadina better be Italian. Most brands begin life as the name of a single product, as the name of a company, or both. The meanings and associations that accrue to the brand over its life come from three sources 1. What the company communicates—the brand’s positioning, advertis- ing, and implied communications (e.g., the type of stores where it is sold, whether there is heavy discounting, and so on).316 TAUBER it is very hard to think of an exact category for Betty Crocker. It is on a lot of different things. The reverse of this is the case of another General Mills brand—Total. Gener- al Mills decided to enter the oatmeal category against Quaker Oats, a brand that is very specific and narrow in meaning. General Mills knew they must fight an uphill battle against the brand that ‘‘owned’” the category. Clearly,