When you have a good, better and best brand strategy like Toyota, you need many degrees of separation.
Toyota needed Lexus to be much more expensive and sold by exclusive dealers not associated with the Toyota brand. Walk into a Lexus dealer and you’d never known the connection to the parent company. In fact, they do as many things differently as possible, so you are thinking luxury not mainstream.
Brands within a portfolio need to be distinct and have wide gaps in position, price and place. They can’t be too close, or they will blend into a brand soup.
Degrees of Separation
Scion, a Toyota brand and the entry-level are now dead. RIP Scion. It suffered from several problems, but mostly, it was the pain of trying to be the young, hip kid. The design never satisfied anyone and was often joked about by the very audience it attempted to reach.
As a value brand, it missed the values of its audience.
Sometimes brands get to endorsements from a larger more prominent parent like Courtyard by Marriot. Scion didn’t get that treatment. It was on its own although sold through Toyota dealerships. What seemed like a wise strategy turned out to be part of the ball & chain it suffered, because it couldn’t ever break away from the Toyota parent’s pocketbook.
Brands need more than capital. They need a chance to be on their own. As a child, when they move away from college, they need to establish their identity and breakout of the parent’s grip. Yes, it is painful, but brands need to be resourceful to flourish.
In my snack food days, I had the opportunity to create new brands, blend brands into existing ones and even take some off life support. The enduring lesson is that a brand needs both position, price and place separation – but also a chance to grow on its own. It is a tough task to start a brand within a billion dollar corporation and allow it to be on its own. Saturn didn’t work, and the brand graveyard is filled with other examples.
If you have a portfolio of brands, is there enough distance from each of them so that they don’t blur together into a brand porridge? Without distance, every brand becomes mushy.
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Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/115323297/ Ian Burt
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