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By Root 600 0

an alternative cleaning aid. The mass consumer didn’t know what to make of it. While greater consumer marketing and educational efforts no doubt would have helped enhance its chance of success, the product opportunity may have been better served by a niche strategy, distributing the product in health-food stores and green-product catalogs until enough of the mass market was prepared to switch to the ecologically-conscious offering.

However, there is another reason why consumers may have been wary. Heinz was a food brand. If the company produced a vinegar, consumers would expect to be able to pour it over their meals. They didn’t expect to find it sitting alongside the bottles of bleach and household detergents.

Of course, for Heinz, the decision to launch the product was a thoroughly logical one. After all, the company already produced vinegar, so why not intensify the strength of that product to create a new one? As Ottman explains in her book, ‘many green products on the market today represent small enhancements or tweaks to existing ones.’

But the ‘tweaks’ to Heinz’s original product had moved the brand away from its core identity – namely, that of a food manufacturer. The fact that both vinegar and Heinz are normally associated with things you can eat only made the product more confusing for the customer. In other words, as All Natural Cleaning Vinegar was based on an existing, edible Heinz vinegar, the product only served to reaffirm the perception of Heinz as a producer of food.

The only trouble was, the cleaning vinegar wasn’t food. As a result, it failed.

Lessons from Heinz

Stick to what you know. But more importantly, stick to what your customers know. If you’re a food brand that means one thing. If you can’t eat it, you can’t sell it.

Expand within the limits of your brand perception. Heinz may be most associated with ketchup but it has numerous other brand successes, and frequently launches new products. Heinz shows that you can extend your line as far as you want, providing you remain true to your core identity or brand perception.

Adopt a niche strategy for a niche product. Heinz All Natural Cleaning Vinegar was distributed and marketed as a mainstream product, although it only appealed to a niche market.

24 Miller

The ever-expanding brand

In 2010, according to Brand Z’s research, Miller Lite held the number eight position in the world’s top beer brands. Miller are credited with virtually creating the whole low-calorie category. However, not everything the company has touched has turned to gold. With a heritage going back to 1855 that’s not exactly surprising.

In the 1970s Miller Brewing Company faced something of an image problem. For years it had been positioning its core brand, Miller High Life, as ‘the champagne of beers’. Jazz musicians had been used in advertising campaigns to endorse the beer and to consolidate its sophisticated image, but the results were increasingly disappointing.

When Business Week profiled the company in November 1976, it explained the problem with Miller’s marketing strategy. ‘Sold for years as the champagne of beers, High Life was attracting a disproportionate share of women and upper-income consumers who were not big beer drinkers [...] A lot of people drank the beer, but none drank it in quantity.’

In order to differentiate itself from its macho rivals, Budweiser and Coors, Miller had feminized its core brand in a bid for wider share of the market. However, the company was starting to learn what Marlboro had realized the decade before when it replaced images of female smokers with the iconic Marlboro Man. The lesson was this: in reaching out to new customers, a brand risks alienating its core market. But help was at hand. Philip Morris, the owners of the Marlboro brand, had purchased Miller at the start of the decade. The company now realized what it had to do.

Just as the Marlboro Man had been an exaggerated image of masculinity, so the new advertising for Miller High Life was designed to out-macho its rivals. Out went the sophisticated jazz