My brand of the month for May is Lucky Saint, for using product development to stretch their brand.
Brand stretch is the idea that a brand can extend into adjacent categories in the right circumstances. It’s harder than it looks. You need to make sure you’re fulfilling a genuine need, that your brand has credibility to deliver in a new context, and that the new offering is distinct enough from your existing one to avoid cannibalisation.
However, the upside is significant: new customers, higher volume, and potentially entirely new markets. Done well, brand stretch is a powerful growth driver.
This brings us to Lucky Saint’s new Lime and Sea Salt non-alcoholic lager. At first glance, it looks like a simple flavour variant. But on closer inspection, it is positioned as helping to rehydrate drinkers through added electrolytes.
This starts to shift Lucky Saint beyond non-alcoholic beer and into functional drinks – or whitespace between the two. It naturally fits with Lucky Saint’s brand and need states (being active and thirsty) and helps to differentiate from both other non-acholic beers (rehydrating), soft drinks (more grown up) and water (more satisfying).
Lucky Saint are therefore Brand of the Month for showing how smart product development can stretch a brand to set up long-term growth.
Every month I share my ‘Brand of the Month’ (BOTM), writing about what I think other marketers can learn about a brand who I think is doing great work at the moment, in less than 200 words (or 1min reading time).
Tim Clancy is a brand builder working at LinkedIn and at the intersection of strategy, execution, and marketing effectiveness. He loves a tight brief, a big idea and Richard Rumelt (his writing at least). He also runs a blog, Brand! Fizz! Wallop!, where he shares his latest thoughts on brands, marketing and leadership; and coaches people on how incorporate AI into their day to day so they can have fulfilling and successful careers.
