Which are the bizarre brand extensions that befuddled consumers? A market is a tough place where it is hard to reach the top, but it is even harder to stay on top. There is a need of constantly providing good service or good products, because customers, old or new, are not very forgiving. At the moment you mess up, they will find another company that can satisfy their needs. That is why the companies are under constant pressure to provide what market and customers need. Because of that, companies are always trying to invent something new or upgrade their existing products. There are no rules for how it is supposed to be done, but some brand extensions ended up as a disaster and some ended up as the best thing that brand did. We guess that a company has to give it a try and maybe the extension will be successful. Some brands crossed the line and went to the part of the market they don’t belong to and made bizarre extensions like for example Zippo making women’s perfume in a bottle that looks like a lighter, which actually made everybody ask: what were they thinking? But not every extension is a fiasco. There are very successful ones like Guinness making their tasty dark beer stout.
On the other hand, the majority of extensions are failures. If you are interested in which were the biggest ones, we recommend that you read Insider Monkey’s article 5 Bizarre Brand Extensions That Befuddled Consumers. At the 5th place on the list is Smith & Wesson Bikes and Apparel. Smith and Weston are gun manufacturers, who are famous for providing guns for the police, decided to sell them bikes, too. It wasn’t a popular move since you can’t even find the bikes in their offer on their website. But they are still selling apparel and they changed their name to American Outdoor Brands Corp in order to include more outdoor gear. To find out the rest of this list, just click on the link above.
