Episode Transcript
Using that example from last episode, Coca Cola is a company, but it’s also a brand of soda. It’s formal business name is, The Coca Cola Company. The Coca Cola Company owns Sprite, which is a different brand from the soda, Coca Cola.
Coca Cola, the brand of cola soda, could have made a “Coke Lemon-Lime” and packaged it as a bottle of clear, lemon-lime soda, that looked like the Sprite drink, but put in a bottle with a Coca Cola label. My guess is, that probably wouldn’t have done so well…
Doing that would dilute, no pun intended, the cola brand. Coca Cola is a cola flavored soda. Who wants them making a clear soda that doesn’t taste anything like cola? No one.
That’s what Sprite is for. And Sprite directly competes with Sierra Mist and 7-Up, while The Coca Cola Company profits.
The Coca Cola Company also owns several other brands. If you go to the company website, they show you the other brands and they say they are, “Crafting brands and choices people love” and they’re “Providing refreshments in body and spirit”.
To offer a healthy option, they could have made a “Coca Cola water” or, to do something a little more fun, they could have come out with a “Coca Cola Lemonade” but those products would be better delivered by other brands because, again, Coca Cola is a trusted cola. We don’t trust them to make any drink well just because that red and white label is on it.
Instead, The Coca Cola Company sells several other products under different brand names. A few of the brands they own are:
Sprite, Fanta, Minute Maid, Dasani AND smartwater, Innocent, Simply (as in Simply Lemonade), and Honest Tea. Those aren’t all the brands, but those are a few.
One thing I want to point out is: some of these brands are in direct competition with one another.
Dasani is a brand of water and smartwater is a brand of water. Minute Maid sells lemonade and Simply Lemonade sells lemonade, but Coca Cola understands that the same product of water, or lemonade, won’t necessarily resonate with people the same way if they are branded differently.
So the people who might buy Dasani are different than the people who might buy smartwater.
The same with Minute Maid and [Simply].
Those two products are the same, effectively, because they’re both lemonades, but, the people who are interested in the Minute Maid brand are going to be different, sometimes, than the people who are interested in the Simply Lemonade brand.
I want you to understand that right now, your company and your brand might be the same thing, because you only offer one thing.
As your [business] grows, you may realize that you need more than one brand to serve all of the niches that you want to serve. And that’s OK.
Your company can have multiple brands as needed to appropriately and comfortably serve a variety of audiences.
So, don’t be afraid of choosing a niche now because you don’t want to be limited.
Your one business can lead in multiple niches by branching out with different brands for your services or products that solve different problems for different people.
