Stretching the media brand

You'll spend hours a day listening to your favourite radio station. And you'll happily hand over £3 a month for a magazine. But would you get excited about a Good Housekeeping casserole, sign up with the Classic FM dating agency or sip carrots at the Vogue Juice Bar?

What started off a few years ago as a trickle of media-brand extensions, with the likes of OK! magazine's unsuccessful foray into masthead television, has now become a veritable flood as media titles scramble aboard the brand-extension gravy train. But just how far will you go for your favourite media brand? Or, to put it another way, just how far can a brand stretch before it snaps?

These, rather than traditional concerns over content and presentation, are the questions taxing many of the finest minds in the media at the moment. "Publishers have ceased thinking of what they do as simply producing editorial product and started thinking in terms of brands - a set of values that can be translated into other areas," explains Ed Fones, US publisher of Men's Health magazine.

"The advantage is that they can act as a great promotion for the main product while generating revenue profits in an increasingly crowded market," says Fones. It's especially important at a time when circulations and advertising revenue are looking so fragile. Men's Health now has 25 different editions. But it has also moved into books, a TV show and radio programmes, and is considering licensing deals for a range of Men's Health products in the US.

Fones says any extension should be "relevant and core to the business". It is advice that is being interpreted in the UK in very different ways by different publishing houses.

Emap, for instance, has a very tightly defined extension strategy, limited to what has been called "the golden triangle of media" - print, broadcast and on-line. It recently launched satellite TV versions of Smash Hits magazine and the easylistening Magic FM radio station and is planning similar extensions with the new-metal mag Kerrang, classic rock title Q and dance-music station Kiss.

Classic FM, meanwhile, has entered what can only be described as "brand-extension heaven", with a slightly more daring but extraordinarily successful approach to building on its brand. Not content with producing an eponymous bestselling magazine, hit CDs and sell-out concerts, it has branched out into credit cards and even a dating agency.

The result has been a series of what the marketing gurus call "self-liquidating promotions" - brand extensions that not only pay for themselves but bring in extra profits while enlarging the consumer franchise and reinforcing what the brand stands for.

"We have a set of brand values - non-threatening relevance, accessibility and modernity," says Classic FM managing director Roger Lewis. "Before we embark on a new venture we ask ourselves, what value is it adding to listeners' experience and how does it increase loyalty to reinforce the main brand?"

The National Magazine Company, which owns Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, is probably the leadanding exponent of the media-brand extension, with a bold, some say cavalier, take on the subject. Cosmo, in particular, has been ruthless about exploiting commercial opportunities. It is currently planning a chain of 20 Cosmopolitan Life Centres - cafes offering health, nutrition and beauty advice.

It also has the Cosmopolitan Collection, which slaps the Cosmo stamp on practically any item favoured by the Cosmo reader. The list is seemingly endless, with Cosmo clothing, bed linen, lingerie, hosiery, eyewear, homeware, swimwear, accessories, sunglasses, jewellery, watches and books.

However, as the magazine has found to its cost, brand extensions can also turn sour. Cosmo yoghurt was pulled last year after just 18 months on the market. It is also considering the future of the Cosmopolitan Show, which ran for six years but is rumoured to have been unprofitable.

And in 1999 Capital Radio had ignominiously to close down its cafes after just three years - losing £35 million in the process. "We thought there was strategic value - the people going into the restaurants were the same kind of people that listen to Capital Radio. It wasn't as strong as we thought," said Capital's chief executive David Mansfield at the time. It is for this reason that Conde Nast has been the one major UK publisher to hold out against the fashion for brand extensions.

With the exception of the Vogue Juice Bar on the ground floor of its Hanover Square HQ, which it says it only opened because Westminster planners wanted retail activity in the space, it has resolutely stuck to glossy mags.

Vogue's publishing director Stephen Quinn is scathing on the subject. "I am deeply sceptical about mediabrand extensions," he says. " Whenever a company goes beyond its core business the whole damn thing falls apart."

He argues that brand extensions rarely make the money people claim. "There's a lot of boasting and hubris on the subject, with people making all sorts of false claims. The truth is they take up management time, they take you into areas in which you have no expertise, they often bring you into competition with your advertisers and if they are not rigorously policed, they can actively undermine the brand. It's not diversification that makes money, but concentrating on your business."