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As a mature medium,
newspapers seem ideally suited to brand extension. They need the new
revenue, they need to revitalize their core brand, whose public image may
have become moribund through familiarity, and they can capitalize on decades
of brand equity; in many cases, more than a century’s worth. Canadian
newspaper publishers aren’t as far along the brand extension road as their
colleagues in England or the United States. But the latter ntions boast
newspapers that have leveraged their reputations into new products, and in
some cases entire new businesses.
The New York Times
Company, for instance, continues to follow a long-established strategy of
concentrating on its core strength — disseminating information — and making
that the basis for new products that offer information to new audiences or
in new ways. The company that started with a newspaper owns Manhattan
classical station WQXR-FM, keeping with the Times’s upscale audience
and its probable tastes. Many of the paper’s contributors provide features
for the radio station. WQXR is just one of a stable of Times Co. broadcast
properties. (The Gannett newspaper chain also owns a number of television
stations.) In the case of the Times, there’s also Times Books, using
the instantly recognizable stamp of a preeminent newspaper as a means of
instantly communicating the gravity and thoroughness of nonfiction volumes.
Similarly, Dow Jones
and Company uses its flagship paper, The Wall Street Journal, as both
product and marketing engine, mostly for books — often investment or
corporate career guides. Both the Times and the Journal have
elaborate sites on the World Wide Web. The Times’s is free; the
Journal’s isn’t.
The newspapers in
Canada’s largest market are also using their Web sites as a means of both
advertising their core products while adding luster to the Web site by
positioning it as another - electronic - version of the daily paper.
“We are launching a
product called Globefund,” says Globe and Mail marketing
vice-president Darcia Joseph. “It’s Canada’s only comprehensive mutual fund
Web site. It’s repurposing the original mutual fund data as provided through
Report On Business. But it’s also got all the interactivity that
you’d want in a Web site; for example, the ability to analyze your
portfolio, to look at archival or other people’s opinions of the performance
of a certain fund. It’s got all kinds of really neat features. That’s a
perfect example of brand extension in new media that is a combination of the
equities that exist in the parent brand. Those equities are both The
Globe and Mail and our equities in Report On Business.”
The Globe and
Mail has been particularly aggressive on the print front, launching some
younger companions for the 12-year-old Report On Business Magazine.
Quarterly titles focusing on food and fashion are just two examples. Clones
of the daily Report On Business have helped, too. Report On
Telecommunications, Report On Mutual Funds, Report On Network Solutions —
every one of them takes something Globe readers already know and
trust and aims it at a new area, thereby widening the scope of the parent
and reinforcing the paper’s reputation as the prime source for rock-solid
information, especially for business.
The Globe has
it easy in that respect. It’s always worked to maintain the regular paper
and the ROB as two discrete entities. As such, it’s got two brands, either
of which can exist on its own or be extended independently.
That might make it
seem easy. But extension isn’t simply a matter of pasting the paper’s logo
on another product. Brand-management questions have to govern the decision.
Is the new product going to find its own audience and reflect well on its
parent? Has the proposed new product got enough reason to exist that there’d
be a need for it even if it weren’t spawned from a newspaper? Are the core
values that built the parent’s brand equity expressed in the new product? If
the answer isn’t “yes” to all these considerations, the extension’s probably
a bad idea.
“Do it where it’s
smart and where it clearly establishes the identity of the new product for
your audience,” Joseph says. “It’s got to work for both your advertisers and
your readers. And only link the new product and the parent when it is of
benefit both to the parent brand and to the new product to have that
association.”
Brand extension is
not the same thing as partnership. Joseph says the linkage between the Globe
and computer push-technology news service was mutually beneficial. And while
many of the brand extension considerations govern such alliances, “I don’t
think of partnerships as brand extensions, really. From a marketing point of
view, I’d consider that pure, classic marketing as opposed to product
launch.”
“We’re conscious of
how we do it and how often we extend brands,” says Joseph. “You don’t want
to jeopardize the integrity of the parent brand by diluting it in any way.
We work very hard to protect the values that people associate with this
brand name. They’re quite powerful, so we’re quite careful with how it’s
used.”
The Toronto Star
has worked to protect its brand identity even as it branches out in
direct-response television. Toronto Star TV, which launched Oct. 17
(Marketing, Oct. 27, p. 40), offers many of the same things the paper’s
readers look to the print version for: timely information they can use
immediately. They’re not looking for an explanation about what Asian
currency exchange rates will do to their mutual funds. They just want to
know what movies are playing and what time they start.
The Toronto Sun
is also taking to the Web as part of its extension strategy. As co-owner of
the CANOE Web site along with BCE Inc. of Montreal, the Sun makes certain
its logo is prominently displayed, along with subscription ads.
Another Sun Media
paper, the outfit’s national flagship, The Financial Post, has its
own site as part of the Canoe array. There’s also The Financial Post
Magazine, a mature brand extension that serves much the same purpose;
it’s got a trusted name, sells advertising, and offers another way for eager
advertisers to reach established Post readers and for Sun Media to
make some money to offset costs.
Toronto Sun
marketing director Lynda Schwalm maintains will boost readership of all the
company’s papers.
“I would hope that
people would read information on the Web site that came from the Toronto
Sun and think, ‘Hey, I might start buying the Sun every day,’ “
she says. “It’s not something we’ve tracked yet, but it definitely happens.
Not only is the Sun an information provider for CANOE, it can attract
new readers to the paper. Certainly we would look for opportunities to use
CANOE to attract more readers for us and more subscribers. It’s something we
haven’t developed to the extent that we can and will.” |
