The Real Special K Challenge: Successful Brand Extensions

What’s so special about Special K?

Many people aren’t even sure exactly what Special K is made of. (For the record, the crunchy brown flakes contain mostly rice and wheat.) But they do know that Special K is the cereal of choice if you want to lose weight. A clinical study in the UK has shown that replacing two meals a day with Special K results in slimmer waists and hips.  If you’re engaged in the Battle of the Bulge, Special K is a valuable ally.

And therein lies much of the secret of Special K’s success. Brand Modeling tells us that a company wins when they put their best customer’s needs front and center, focusing all of the energy and resources of the organization on the single goal of giving customers what they want, in exactly the way they want it.

Lots of companies know that their customers want to lose weight. The drive to shed pounds and enjoy a healthier, fitter, slimmer body is almost universal.  Special K is successful because they’ve delved into their customer base, hoping to understand more than the fact that their customers want to lose weight. Understanding that fact isn’t enough. Special K needed to know WHY their customers want to lose weight.  They needed to understand HOW their customers wanted to lose weight.

Know Your Customers = Know Your Brand

The more we know about our customers, the easier it becomes to sell to them.  That’s one of the fundamental tenets of Brand Modeling. Kellogg’s has demonstrated this admirably. It was their understanding of the Special K customer that lead to an impressive array of brand extensions.  The humble brown flakes have been joined by nine other flavors of Special K cereal. That’s not all.  There are Special K cereal bars, meal bars, and snack bars. There are Special K fruit crisps, snacks, and crackers. There are protein shakes and protein water mixes.

How did Kellogg’s know that these brand extensions would be successful?

The Special K Challenge

To answer that question, we have to look at the Special K challenge.  Once upon a time, the Special K challenge was a simple thing: eat Special K for breakfast and lunch for two weeks, and the pounds will fall right off.  Now, however, people with pounds to lose can create their own individual Special K challenge.

Special K helped people lose weight, but only if they could commit themselves to a monk-like bowl of brown flakes twice a day for two weeks. Some people found pleasure in the ascetic, Spartan approach, but more people failed the Special K challenge because they gave into the desire for variety.

Dominant organizations win because they act when they identify a tension that their customers have with their products. Special K knew that a steady diet of nothing but brown flakes held limited appeal, even for their best customers. By identifying the need for culinary excitement that also facilitated weight loss, Special K found the best way to expand their brand. Other tensions their customers were experiencing, such as the need for meals that could be eaten rapidly, were also solved by the brand extensions, particularly cereal, snack and meal bars.

In short, the Special K team found a way to make the Special K challenge easier while still delivering the desired results. Now Special K is one of the strongest brands in the world’s largest cereal company, Kellogg’s. They’ve found their own recipe with success. With Brand Modeling, your company can do the same.

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