Pitch Magazine (2)

I managed to get the article, mentioned here, fowarded to me. And here it is, in its entirety.

Chocolate Weetabix: A brand extension too far?


3 September 2010
By David Benady

Some of the UK’s biggest grocery brands are launching line extensions that seem to contradict the values of their parent brands. As the economic downturn hits sales and shoppers turn to own labels, brand marketers are under pressure to meet tough sales targets. But launching opportunist off-shoots risks undermining the long-term equity of their brands.

Weetabix, Britain’s top-selling breakfast cereal, contains just 4.4% sugar and is much-loved by parents concerned about shovelling sugar into their children’s mouths at breakfast time. Now the £113m brand with excellent kiddie health credentials is launching Chocolate Weetabix.

The chocolate-laced version will appear in a new TV ad campaign breaking this week through agency WCRS. The blogosphere is awash with positive commentary about the product which boasts that its sugar content - 15.9% - is less than half that of other chocolate cereals such as Coco-Pops (35% sugar). But the brand extension contains three and a half times as much sugar as its parent brand. Nutritionalists warn that once children taste the delights of chocolate at breakfast, it is hard to ever return them to a healthy cereal.

The Chocolate version risks damaging the association between Weetabix and a healthy breakfast for kids. It may well be successful in the short-term. But the values of the main brand could be undermined in the long-run. For some, the Chocolate Weetabix launch is a logical response to parents’ health concerns and carries the health credentials of Weetabix into a new arena - enabling consumers of chocolate cereals to find a much lower sugar alternative. Weetabix marketing director Sally Abbott was unavailable and no-one else at the company was prepared to comment.

Meanwhile, in the personal care category, Unilever has extended its female-orientated Dove brand into the male grooming market with the launch of Dove Men+Care. Here, a brand built through a critique of women’s consumption psychology and the “Real Beauty” campaign seems to be dropping those values as it seeks to target men. Unilever claims the launch has been a phenomenal success, with 1.5 million products sold in the UK so far this year and the brand is on course to hit 5 million in its launch year. With each unit selling at about £2.50 each, that could be some £12.5m. On this estimate, sales at retail would just cover the cost of the £12m launch marketing budget.

According to Christian Barnett, planning director at branding agency Coley Porter Bell, Dove Men+Care builds on the basic values of the brand. “Dove stands for inner beauty, real beauty in all sorts of people. Why shouldn’t that extend to men? It just feels right,” he says. However, he is less convinced about Chocolate Weetabix. “Sometimes you can see brand extensions undercutting a brand. Weetabix is a healthy, simple, fortifying breakfast. The addition of chocolate doesn’t build that equity, it detracts from it. The only way to really make it work would be to think again what the overall brand stands for. If Weetabix is about “healthy fortification” the introduction of chocolate starts to push the overall Weetabix brand to a more “fortification can be fun” place. So the extension redefines the parent brand. It is like the kids re-defining the parents.”

Other seemingly self-contradicting product extensions out this autumn include Twix Fino, where the biscuit base that has helped Mars-owned Twix become a UK powerbrand is replaced by a lighter wafer filling. This version has long been available in Europe, where wafers are commonly eaten with afternoon coffee. But in the UK, this seriously redefines the product’s identity away from a stomach-filler towards a lighter snack.

Twix will be competing with Kit Kat, whose owner Nestlé is itself the arch extender of brands into unexpected areas - it rocked the confectionery market when it relaunched Kit Kat with a Chunky version as it attempted to encroach into the territory of the Mars Bar. Nestlé marketers at the company’s York-based confectionery division have applied the brand extension approach to Milkybar, the quintessential kids’ white chocolate bar. This is being reinvented as an adult treat with a Raisin & Biscuit version. The brand is moving deep into the territory of rival brands and appears to be category vaulting, re-inventing itself as part biscuit, part short-bread. A spokesman says the company is simply broadening the appeal of the brand. “Milkybar is proof that you can take long-standing brand and advertising heritage and bring it up to date. We haven’t changed the recipe, we’ve added a product for adult tastes, we’ve held on to the Milkybar kid, the line, the song, but made them fun and relevant and interactive for an adult audience.”

The whole sweets and treats category is awash with cross-over products seeking to cash in on the brand values of competitors. Kraft-owned Cadbury has teamed up with Burton’s Foods to launch biscuit versions of Turkish Delight, Crunchie and Caramel. Sales are reported to be booming, with some £7.6m of the biscuits sold since their launch in March. One wonders how long this boom in countline branded biscuits will continue, what will be the effects on the mother brands and whether the sector is driven by people trialling the products out of interest.

Some observers are sceptical about the drive to launch sub-brands. As one says: “Brand managers and marketers are typically only in their jobs for 18 months and in that time might have about eight reporting cycles, where they need to show growing sales. It doesn’t matter what the long-term impact on the brand is of launching an extension, even if it dilutes the equity and confuses the positioning of the main brand, they have got to make a difference.”

Such marketers have been dubbed “galloping midgets,” who are more interested in personal advancement than in the health of their brands in the long-run. Then again, as Keynes said, in the long-run, we are all dead.

Striking the right balance when launching a brand extension is crucial, but all too often extensions have to be reined in after swamping the master brand with conflicting brand values. Unilever has spent the past ten years pruning back its portfolio to a handful of power brands. Now the portfolio is growing again with continual brand extensions. Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble has been reducing the number of brand extensions around its Pringles Crisps brand, phasing out Minis and Select.

The economic downturn has sent marketers scurrying to look for short-term hits from brand extensions which play on the values of the parent brand as they struggle to hit their numbers. But they should beware of destroying brand equity that has been steadily built up over decades.

Strangest brand extensions of all time

- Sex Pistols scent
- Snoop Dogg’s range of pet accessories
- Budweiser Barbecue Sauce
- Cheetos Lip Balm
- Burger King fragrance BK@Flame which “captures the essence of Whopper love in the form of a body spray.”