Most people have experienced brand dilution at one point or another. You find a brand you know and love, but over time, it grows in a direction that no longer aligns with your needs or values.

As organizations grow, they commonly take on new product lines, trust more people to represent the brand or even acquire other businesses. With this comes a risk that the original promises, values, and quality the brand represented become less and less prominent.

In this post, we cover:

• what is brand dilution?
• what causes brand dilution, and
• examples of brand dilution from susceptible industries.

What is Brand Dilution?

According to Hubspot, “Brand dilution is when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.”

When a company unsuccessfully extends its brand, it dilutes the power of its original brand story and existing associations with the brand. Typically, this happens when a once-strong brand name is attached to a new, lower-quality product or a product that’s extremely different from the core brand (which leads to confusion and the brand losing customer trust).

Another situation where a brand can become diluted is when the company tries to grow and the team becomes too big, too fast. This causes dilution in two ways: the first is that the team is stretched too thin, which results in lower-quality work; the second is that they lose control of the brand due to a lack of brand standards.

What Causes Brand Dilution?

Here, we’ll expand on the top three reasons behind brand dilution:

1. Stretching Capacity Too Thin
2. Introducing Unrelated Services or Products
3. Losing Control of the Brand

1. Stretching Capacity Too Thin

When organizations take on new product lines or services, they can require teams to work beyond their capacities. When teams are stretched thin, standards can be diminished, resulting in a lower-quality message or product. For example, asking a creative team to now work on the messaging for a brand extension along with the existing brand will likely result in disrupted workflows, unreasonable deadlines, and inconsistencies.

2. Introducing Unrelated Services or Products

A company taking on new products or services that don’t align with the existing brand values or messaging is often a recipe for disaster. Not only can it confuse your supporters, but it can also deteriorate the perceived value of the overall brand.

One famous example among marketing professionals is the Cadbury instant mashed potatoes story. In the 1960s, Cadbury launched a product called Smash, which was instant mashed potatoes. The product sold well but at the expense of Cadbury’s overarching reputation as a premium chocolate brand. Due to extreme brand dilution, Cadbury sold Smash in 1986 despite being popular.

3. Losing Control of the Brand

The more people can represent a brand, the higher the risk for dilution of that brand. For example, imagine a brand with complete control of any marketing messaging; then, to grow the brand, they open up offices across the country where dozens or even hundreds of team members can send out messaging on behalf of the brand. This is where the dilution can happen – outdated logos, slogans, or images; activities that are not on-brand; social media messaging that doesn’t match the official vision of the brand. This dilution can be just as harmful as a failed brand extension.

Learn how ACAMS effectively manages a global brand with a MediaValet DAM

Four Ways to Prevent Brand Dilution

While there are several ways to prevent brand dilution, there are 4 we recommend:

1. Prioritize the Core Brand
2. Introduce New Products Slowly
3. Communicate the Brand Clearly
4. Provide Access to Approved Brand Material

1. Prioritize the Core Brand

It is highly important to hold on to earned, loyal customers and fight for the brand associations you’ve worked hard for. Brands should be selective when choosing how and where to expand products or services. Always look at expansion through the lens of protecting the core brand, which is important for the company’s longevity. Ensure that any new ventures won’t contradict the messaging or reputation of the existing brand.

2. Introduce New Products with Care

Provide the necessary space and time to introduce new products with care and thoughtfulness without diminishing quality. New product development and roll-out processes deserve a place in the brand strategy.

3. Communicate the Brand Clearly

Ensure that every person who can represent your brand understands the brand messaging, values and expectations. These brand standards allow these individuals to provide the same messaging and level of service aligned with the brand.

4. Provide Access to Approved Brand Material

Ensure that everyone who is representing the brand is set up for success. This means providing the team with easy access to brand assets, such as logos, images, graphics for social media, etc. It’s vital to standardize brand messaging and collateral as part of an overall brand strategy and make it accessible.

Brand Dilution Examples by Industry

Franchises

The most notorious industry for being impacted by brand dilution in the franchise industry. This is mainly due to the free rein that franchisees are granted when it comes to creating and distributing marketing collateral or messaging. It’s almost impossible to maintain control of the brand when multiple franchise owners are providing different service levels and not adhering to any specific set of brand standards.

Consumer Products

The consumer product industry is typically the most susceptible to failed product extensions. One example would be the documented failure of Colgate Kitchen Entrees—when the well-known oral hygiene brand tried to take advantage of the take-home meal market in 1982. This confusing move to link toothpaste and frozen meals threatened to dilute the brand. It can be hard to evaluate when a brand extension is too far out there—but this one should have been obvious.

Technology

The problem in the tech industry is that things move so fast because of the highly competitive environment that it can cause brands to release new features or products at a speedy rate—too fast to get things right. Tech companies need to be meticulous in planning releases to prevent stretching the team too thin and not doing the brand justice, thus causing brand dilution.

Keep Your Brand in Tip-Top Shape

A robust and well-represented brand starts with consistency. A consistent brand not only improves brand awareness and recognition but it’s also linked to an increase in revenue. A digital asset management solution helps organizations stay on-brand by providing seamless access to your approved, high-quality assets – from anywhere in the world. Learn more about digital asset management and its benefits.

Take the self-guided MediaValet tour to see how a DAM can help you organize your brand assets.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

In this series, we’re highlighting some of the common stakeholders we see involved in a DAM project, discussing their unique challenges and priorities, and showing how a digital asset management initiative aligns with their goals.

The CMO is responsible for driving marketing revenue, impacting P&L and market share for the company, and improving customer experiences with the brand. They help to drive the overall business strategy, vision, and corporate direction and spearhead the company’s brand promise and visual identity. The CMO acts as the “voice of the customer” and often impacts decisions being made in product development, distribution, and more.

The CMO is accountable to the CEO, shareholders, and board of directors and responsible for aligning their team to ensure they achieve ROI on marketing initiatives and for maintaining brand integrity and growth.

In this post we will cover

• Goals and Challenges of the CMO
• CMO Impact on a DAM Project
• Benefits of a DAM to the CMO

Goals and Challenges of the CMO

The CMO typically focuses on these three primary goals to achieve marketing success.

1. Improving brand consistency across all channels

The CMO holds the overall responsibility for the company’s brand. This includes brand vision, the strategy behind growing the brand, and ensuring that it’s consistently represented across every interaction with the company. Brand colors, types of imagery, tone of voice across all channels, and product shots represent the multitude of elements that are associated with the brand. When every touchpoint is consistent and delivers experiences aligned with the brand promise, the strength of the brand increases. On the other hand – every inconsistent experience detracts from brand perception and erodes customer trust.

With multiple opportunities to interact with the brand, including digital, social, media, and public interactions, it’s difficult to uphold visual consistency across every channel at any given time. This means that the CMO needs to implement tools and processes to ensure that brand standards are clearly defined, and approved brand resources are easily accessible to anyone representing the brand.

2. Maximizing the impact of marketing initiatives

While every team in the marketing department will have different areas of responsibility or expertise, the CMO needs to ensure that every initiative aligns with the company’s overall goals. An individual project can lead to positive results, but when multiple projects are aligned toward a common goal, their impact is multiplied.

In addition to the overall strategy and team-based KPIs, creating an environment of communication across teams and locations is important for marketing success. A combination of collaboration, project management, and distribution tools are necessary to support this alignment strategy and ensure brand assets are used to their full potential, increasing resource reach and improving ROI.

3. Delivering measurable results and driving growth

Marketing impacts multiple sources of revenue and is usually responsible for a large portion of net-new revenue growth. The CMO is responsible for proving the marketing team’s value to the organization by demonstrating clear, tangible, goal-driven results, specifically how the team impacts the bottom line.

The CMO needs to prioritize initiatives that drive higher ROI or significantly reduce marketing operations costs. As part of this, they need to evaluate their teams’ existing processes and evaluate where processes can be improved, or redundancies can be eliminated.

CMO Impact on a DAM Project

Digital asset management projects are often initiated within the marketing department, although they usually impact other areas, such as sales, IT, and creative production. As the overall marketing budget owner, the CMO is often the final sign-off on larger digital asset management projects.

As DAM can be a major project, crossing different departmental lines and involving multiple stakeholders, the CMO needs to evaluate and understand the high-level impact of the initiative and the overall business case. They’ll also likely decide on the scope of the project, determining whether it will be a single-team rollout, a multi-department system, or a cross-organization implementation.

Here are questions for the CMO to consider when making decisions about a DAM initiative:

1. How does a company’s marketing tech stack compare with the best-performing organizations within this industry? Have industry peers implemented a DAM solution with success?

2. Can revenue-generating teams and partners find and leverage content and brand assets created by the marketing team? Are they easy to find and share?

3. Is the design team enabled to meet the growing volume of creative content? Are project timelines jeopardized because of delays in creative production?

4. Is the brand at risk with the current content and visual asset management practices? Can you ensure all customer-facing assets are upholding brand visual and messaging standards?

5. Are investor and board accountability requirements being met? Are there reports available for content and creative usage?

6. Is there a risk of high-value asset loss (photography originals, investor content, etc.) with the current asset management practices?

Benefits of a DAM to the CMO

When approaching a CMO with the benefits of digital asset management, it’s important to think high-level. Here are some benefits to consider highlighting:

Improved ROI: A digital asset management system enables the marketing department to shorten time to market, enable faster product launches, and more easily deliver content to relevant internal and external stakeholders, by providing users with instant access to on-brand, pre-approved assets.

Improved Operational Efficiency: With DAM, teams are able to collaborate on and update content more easily and efficiently and distribute it across multiple channels with ease. A DAM also removes common bottlenecks and enables reuse across the team.

Brand Integrity: A DAM ensures that all customer-facing content and visuals are on-brand and consistent in messaging, using approval processes and versioning. Teams are enabled with self-serve access to the collateral they need, ensuring employees, partners, and agencies never need to turn to outside sources to get the material they need.

Cost Reduction: A DAM eliminates extra costs associated with lost digital assets and duplicate asset purchases. It also reduces content creation time (and cost), team workload, and time spent on administrative tasks.

Rights Management: A DAM allows an organization to securely allow internal and external stakeholders access only assets that are relevant to them, using advanced user group permissions. This ensures teams are only seeing and using the content that’s relevant to them.

This is the first of a three-part series highlighting common stakeholders you need to get on board with digital asset management. Don’t forget to read parts 2 and 3, on the VP of IT and Creative Operations.

Here’s some other helpful content, to help you build the business case for DAM project across your organization:

• ROI Calculator and Business Case
• Key Stakeholder Benefits Deck
• 3 Categories of Users to Consider