Dunkin Donuts On My Face

One must take care in writing brief blog posts on serious topics before finishing his iced coffee in the morning, otherwise he’ll end up with misunderstandings like the one that happened yesterday on this blog.

In Dunkin Donuts: Revisited, I brought up the concept of brands that damage themselves by offering new products largely irrelevant to their message and mission, just because customers ask for them in surveys and focus groups.

Matt Thommes, a developer, blogger, and Twitterer, commented on the post in disagreement, and wrote a longer reaction on his own blog. To my surprise, I completely agreed with him. And then I realized that the reason is we are talking about two related, but slightly different things.

Matt’s post correctly states that “your brand consists of your products and services,” not the other way around, and if you do it right, your brand will expand to encompass any new offerings as time goes on. He cites Apple as an example of a company that started in one business (computer hardware), and grew to include another, drastically different business (music and entertainment), and I couldn’t agree with him more.

But I wasn’t exactly clear in my post. I wasn’t writing against necessary expansion and market differentiation, but cases when it is done poorly. I used Dunkin Donuts and Subway as examples, but didn’t really explain why.

The difference between these companies and Apple is the way they go about introducing new products or services. When Apple does it, they throw the full weight of their brand behind the new venture. Both DD and Subway (and other food franchises) run limited, regional tests of new products before deciding whether or not to roll them out on a large scale, and it just feels weak, disingenuous. While I appreciate the reasoning and necessity behind such tests (and the many differences between a computer company and a restaurant), they always feel very much like tests - as though they are using paying customers as guinea pigs. Dunkin Donuts, for instance, is testing lunch food only in Connecticut, and Subway is selling pizza at about 30 locations nationwide (that there’s one in NYC really surprised me, though I admit that the pizza itself was rather tasty, if odd).

As an occasional consumer of products from both brands, it is the inconsistency encountered location to location that rubs me the wrong way, more than the fact that they want or need to expand in order to compete (DD is doing a great job differentiating from Starbucks, by the way). This is something that always annoyed me with McDonalds selling crab cakes on Cape Cod, as well as their brief foray into pizza in the early 90s (in Las Vegas, at least). I really, really liked the pizza, got used to seeing it there and ordering it, and when it was pulled, I felt cheated (especially since I was a child). That’s like Apple saying, “So we’ve been selling music for awhile, but it was just a test in your segment of the market. We’re not doing that anymore.” Brands expand, sure, but for the expansion to be effective, it needs to be consistent.

Some do it right, and some don’t. That’s really what I meant yesterday - that brands should take care not to expand for the sake of expanding, or just because of the results of some survey. They should make strong, well-considered moves and realize that more and more the markets are converging. Once upon a time, it might’ve been possible to conduct isolated trials without the national or global brand being affected, but that time is long gone. The internet has connected people worldwide, and they are talking about your products. They know. They know that you are doing something in one state and not another (and sometimes they want what you’ve got enough to drive cross-country), they know that you can order a “Royale With Cheese” and a beer in Europe, and it’s confusing (not to mention insulting) when you offer Newman’s Own Organic Iced Coffee in Massachusetts, and hawk the same product (or pretty much) as “Premium Roast” in New York.

UPDATE: Matt just posted a related article called Brands Creating Sub-Brands that I definitely agree with.