Brand Design: Rebrand

Part 6: How a traditional brand reaches a new audience

Delight contemporary consumers.

This is the sixth post in our Rebranding blog series.

Your core brand is strong and well-established, with lots of equity. Upstart competitors and PVL are nipping away at the edges and an emerging new target audience has appeared that is looking for something new and different. Your business is changing and it’s time to respond.

Your core brand does not need a refresh and has a solid business – so what then? A brand extension. A close cousin to the refresh – an extension builds upon existing brand equities to evolve a new line of product offerings.

Take Purina Pet Gear for example. It’s no secret that people are crazy about their pets, and Purina has defined pet nutrition for decades. For a successful brand extension – linkage to the trust and goodwill of the parent master brand, Purina, is the starting point. Then, expanding into an entirely different product offering – consisting of grooming products, leashes, bedding and toys with a distinctly unique brand mark, clearly signaling a new offspring of the parent brand.

A quirky cartoon dog that is bright green and blue demonstrates the difference between a Master Brand and a Sub-Brand logo with different placement of the text for the brand expansion example.

Building on Purina’s long-standing brand equity with fresh colors, shapes and fonts, the new quirky branding element (our Hippo Dog mascot) all come together to create a brand extension that engages a completely new audience of consumers.

The driving insight for this brand extension

For the Purina brand extension, we were led by a simple driving insight: we treat our pets as our family.

Building on this insight – pets are people too – this new brand extension connects to its origins, Purina, the trusted pet brand. But it also goes beyond that to now relate to the emotional relationship we have together – pet-to-human. We even let the end users “speak for themselves,” putting all marketing copy in first-person dog and cat.

Product packaging for the Purina Pet Gear snuggle mat is shown following the brand extension and design by domo domo marketing.

Three stages of a single Purina Pet Gear product are shown, from concept design, to prototype, to the product in the packaging. These details were part of the brand extension and design process with domo domo marketing.

So, what is a brand extension?

A brand extension is a specialized design discipline, honed over years of experience coupled with an approach grounded in the science of marketing and the art of creative design. Unlike a brand redesign, a brand extension builds upon existing brand equities to evolve a new line of product offerings.

In the right hands, this process is an effective, and fast strategy to expand your brand franchise and attract new customers.

A photo of a white woman with brown hair holding up a bulldog that is tilting its head and hanging its tongue out of its mouth playfully.

Explore the Rebrand Series:

Thanks for reading the sixth installment in our monthly series on rebranding, where we share insights, ideas, and inspiration to help inform your next brand and packaging refresh. Ready to learn more? See the full rebranding series.

At domo domo marketing we are brand and packaging refresh experts. It’s our thing. For other examples: Check out our work.