The Infinite Learning

I have watched brands lose themselves one good decision at a time.

Not through failure. Through success.

A product works. Sales come in. The organisation, quite reasonably, asks: where else can we take this? A new segment. A cheaper variant. A premium extension. A category adjacent to the one where the brand built its name. Each move is logical. Each move is defensible. Each move is approved in a boardroom where everyone is looking at a number and nobody is looking at the brand.

This is how brand drift begins. Not with a bad decision. With a series of individually sensible ones.

What the Organisation Sees – And What It Misses

The organisation rarely notices when it is happening. They are watching revenue. Revenue is healthy. Sometimes, in the early stages of drift, revenue actually improves – because you have added volume from new segments, new price points, new categories. The brand is working harder. It is also becoming less. But the P&L does not show you that. The P&L shows you this quarter. Brand equity, which is what you are slowly spending down, shows up much later.

The first place drift becomes visible is always in the consumer’s head, not the company’s books.

Videocon understood this too late. It began as a television and electronics brand – trusted, familiar, present in Indian homes for a specific reason. Then it moved into white goods, then DTH, then telecom, then oil and gas, then power. Each entry had a business rationale. What it did not have was a brand rationale. The consumer, who had filed Videocon under a clear category in their mind, found they could no longer answer a simple question: what is Videocon? When a consumer cannot answer that question, the brand has already begun to disappear – even if the business is still reporting revenue.

When the Consumer Decides Before the Boardroom Does

This is the thing about brand drift that makes it so difficult to arrest: by the time the organisation sees it clearly, considerable distance has already been covered in the wrong direction.

Levi’s discovered this in the 1990s. A brand that had built its entire identity on denim – on a specific subculture, a specific silhouette, a specific kind of freedom – decided to extend into suits and formal wear. The reasoning was growth. The result was confusion. The consumer who loved Levi’s loved it because it was not the kind of brand that made suits. The moment it became that brand, it became less of the brand they had chosen. Levi’s eventually pulled back. But the retreat cost them years and considerable brand repair.

Pulling back always means acknowledging, internally, that several decisions which were celebrated as growth moves were quietly eroding something that took years to build. That is a hard conversation to have in any organisation.

The Governing Idea

The solution most organisations reach for is a governing idea – a clear, agreed, rigorously held answer to the question: what does this brand stand for, and what does it therefore not stand for? Every growth decision then gets tested against that idea. Not every extension will survive the test. That is the point.

Yahoo is perhaps the most instructive example of what happens without one. At its peak, Yahoo was in search, media, email, news, finance, games and social networking. It was present everywhere. It stood for none of it – not with the clarity that Google owned search or that Facebook owned social. When a brand tries to mean everything, the consumer’s mind, which needs to file things somewhere, files it nowhere in particular. Yahoo did not fail because it lacked product. It failed because it lacked a governing idea strong enough to make all those products cohere.

When the Governing Idea Becomes the Ceiling

But here is the more sophisticated problem and one that fewer organisations are willing to confront honestly.

Sometimes the governing idea is so strong, so deeply fixed in the consumer’s mind, that it becomes a ceiling. You cannot grow through it. You cannot stretch it upward. And if you try, the consumer simply does not follow, because the brand permission does not extend that far.

Maruti Suzuki ran into this ceiling when it attempted to move into premium vehicles. The brand had done everything right. It had built one of the most powerful and trusted automotive identities in India – around value, economy, reliability and accessibility. That is a formidable governing idea. It is also an immovable one. The Indian consumer, who associated Maruti with sensible, affordable, practical motoring, could not make the leap to Maruti as a premium experience. The brand idea that had built the company was precisely the thing preventing it from going where it wanted to go.

The answer was not to fight the consumer’s perception. It was to respect it and build new architecture around it. Nexa was not a Maruti brand trying to feel premium. It was a new retail and brand experience, sitting within the Suzuki family, that gave premium buyers a different door to walk through. The Maruti name carried its equity where it was most powerful. Nexa carried the ambition where Maruti could not go.

Toyota understood this long before Maruti did. When it wanted to compete in the luxury segment, it did not ask the Toyota consumer to reconsider what Toyota meant. It created Lexus – a completely distinct brand identity, a separate retail experience, a different conversation entirely. The Toyota governing idea was preserved. The growth happened anyway. Just not under the same name.

This is a level of strategic maturity that most organisations never reach, because it requires admitting that your brand’s greatest strength is also its greatest constraint.

The Question Nobody Is Asking

The brands that hold their identity across decades of growth share one quality. Somewhere in the organisation, someone is always asking: does this fit? Not does this sell. Does this fit? And sometimes, more often than organisations are comfortable admitting, the honest answer is: it fits, but not under this name.

Growth without a governing idea is not growth. It is accrual. You are adding volume while subtracting meaning. And meaning, once spent, is extraordinarily expensive to rebuild.

The market does not forget what a brand used to be. That memory is both the asset and the obligation.

Article by Amitava Mitra

Brand Strategy and Marketing Communications Consultant and Co-Founder of The Infinite Learning — a leadership and professional capability development company. TEDx Speaker and Amazon Bestselling Author of “Happy Customers. Happier Brands.”