Just as many consumers are finding themselves over-extended financially, many companies are finding themselves over-extended on the brand marketing front. When times are good, and a market opportunity presents itself, it’s a common knee-jerk reaction to extend a successful brand. Fooey Cola is a hit? Great, let’s make Gooey blended cola malts. If all brand extensions were that intuitive, brand architecture wouldn’t be that difficult. In reality, brands are often extended using less obvious relationships.

Marketing researchers at UCLA released a study in 2002 that cast interesting light on how people view brand relationships. The authors focused on “deep” vs. “surface” cues consumers use to evaluate brand extensions. A surface cue is just what it sounds like — Fooey and Gooey sound very similar and use a consistent naming structure and they are both beverages. The relationship between them is a surface cue. On the other hand, if the same company started making Fooey barware, the extension would require a deep cue — Fooey is a cola, you pour cola into a glass, now Fooey makes great cola glasses to enjoy your drink. The consumer has to link the original brand to an abstract category relationship in order to extend the brand in their minds. Understanding the difference can make the difference when you audit your brand portfolio to consider architectural refinements.

But the UCLA study took a novel approach to this subject. They studied the differences between how children and adults evaluate surface vs. deep cues. They found that children 12 and under can evaluate brands using deep cues if they are explicitly asked to do so. If they aren’t primed to evaluate the deep cues, they rely only on the surface cues. Thus, they might favor the Fooey barware because they like the name and think the logo on a glass looks cool. Prime them with the deeper cue and they might give you a different answer, “they’re just trying to sell me a glass.” 12 was a golden age in the study because the researchers found that when respondents were any older, the surface vs. deep dimension nearly mirrored adult behavior.

There are many adult brands who have successfully established a youth market. Starbucks comes immediately to mind. Many of those young Starbucks fans were willing to go with the brand as it extended into bottled beverages, ice cream treats, and music offerings. My own children were adept at finding the Starbucks logo anywhere we went when they were very young. If long-term loyalty is the goal, how do you structure your brand portfolio so that you retain your young brand audience when they age up enough that surface cues are no longer the hook? Many brands find themselves losing an audience when their youngest consumers reach the age of about 14 (e.g., Disney, Mattel). For the brand manager, is there a way to transition those audiences into a new relationship with the brand by switching the focus from surface to deep cues? In other words, can our understanding of the difference between those cues be used to create a migration path for young, loyal customers? Can those cues be used to extend the brand into new markets? And can this form of strategy work without being abused by marketers to further erode public trust about the motives of brands?

Even if your brand doesn’t face the challenge of migrating young audiences up, you should still consider the criteria used in your portfolio to justify extensions. Ask three questions:

1. Is the relationship between brands based on deep or surface cues?
2. If a deep cue, how abstract is the relationship? Does it require significant knowledge of the product or the category for the consumer to make the connection? If a surface cue, is it enough of a link to justify a brand extension or can you roll the extended brand under the primary brand?
3. What is the systemic effect? This particularly applies to complex brand portfolios. How many deep cues are floating around in your system? How many connections can the consumer draw? On the surface level, do multiple extensions dilute the core equity in the brand?

What is a strategist and what is strategy? There’s generally no consensus on the perfect definition of strategy, even from the gurus and pundits. Michael Porter will tell you that strategy is about choices–choosing upon a distinct set of activities that provide competitive advantage. Henry Mintzberg argues that strategy is about emerging patterns of decisions over time. The funny thing about strategy is that both perspectives are right and both somewhat miss the best part of strategy. Strategy is about storytelling. Story is strategy.

Imagine a tribal war camp somewhere in the desert hundreds of years ago. The warriors gather around a fire to discuss the next day’s plan of attack. The tribe probably did decide upon the activities they would emphasize in battle: surprise, a forward march, flanking positions. And undoubtedly, the perspective of the elder warriors and tribal chiefs influenced the priority activities. But the ideas had to be communicated and understood. Something had to link the activities together into a plan of action. That plan had to inspire. It had to have a common theme that helped warriors make decisions in the field when random circumstances forced split second decisions. The plan needed a logic, a linear flow of reasoning that convinced other men to put their lives on the line. In short, the plan had to be a story.

I get paid to review, critique and develop the strategies of some of the world’s biggest companies. Some are better than others, but the best have always been rooted in a good story. They may not ever surface on the New York Times Bestseller List, but these strategies read well. They read concisely. They read simply. Sometimes, they appear so simple and concise that you have to wonder why someone didn’t think of the strategy sooner. It’s a powerful experience to sit through a good strategy presentation. And when it’s really good, people relay the thinking around the water cooler the next day with most of the logic still intact.

Storytelling requires logic. A good story has a beginning, middle and an end. Each part of the story leads to the next part in an orderly fashion to deliver a perfectly natural final conclusion, while still delivering enough revealing twists and turns to keep the audience engaged. This is the art of the storyteller. It is also the art of the strategist.

Unfortunately, many companies have great strategic ideas in search of strategies. These companies have the data. They excel at performing certain activities. They have insights and perspective about what the data means and how the activities influence the data. But when it comes to stringing data, insights and activities together in a manner that communicates a plan of action, they fall short. They lack a story.

My favorite example of this concept is from General George S. Patton when he delivered his most famous speech to the 3rd Army on June 5, 1944. Patton had a masterful strategy. He knew that to win he had to keep his troops moving. There would be no entrenchment. On the eve D-Day, Patton told his troops of his plans in a rousing, famous speech known for its color, frankness, and imagery as much as its strategic insight. With his men fully engaged in his storytelling, Patton told them, “we’re not holding anything; we are advancing constantly, and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose and kick him in the ass.”