On Strategy

Strategic Brand Management: Case Study…

Last month American Rifleman ran an article about the return of Redfield riflescopes.  They’re being made locally by the good folks at Leupold, and I’ve got to say it looks like some really clever tiered branding.

Tiered branding, of course, is when you offer essentially the same product to different customer demographics with  different market positioning and  different branding.  A great example would be Toyota.  They sell to the median auto market with their Toyota brand while marketing the Lexus brand to premium buyers and the Scion to younger, trendier buyers.

Leupold has done something similarly clever in buying the Redfield name and bringing the scope to market.  Redfield was a well-known American brand in years past that has fallen out of production in recent decades.  Leupold, on the other hand, has a reputation for making top of the line, premium priced optics and accessories.

The problem is that not everyone can afford a Leupold scope.  Now Leupold could make a value-price scope, but they’d risk damaging their reputation as a premium brand.  And a value line could potentially drive prices for the rest of the brand down.  So rather than discount that market, Leupold has acquired the Redfield brand.

Because Leupold already knows a thing or two about making and selling scopes, they can leverage that competence to offer a superior product at a value price.  By limiting options and cutting the “nice to have” features, they can market a very high-quality scope under the Redfield brand for a lot better price than many competitors could.

Finally, having weathered a rough economy, they are betting that buyers, particularly shooters who are younger or blue-collar, will value buying an American-made scope.  Again, because of the synergies in manufacture, distribution, marketing, and shared administrative costs, they can afford to pay Americans to make a product at a price that remains competitive with imports.

All told, it is some very clever strategic positioning on the part of the people at Leupold.  It reminds me of a project I worked on in the motorcycle industry a couple years ago.  We were never able to work the details out on that for a number of reasons, but it is good to see someone else implement a very smart tiered branding strategy and I suspect it will be a big hit for them.

Tags: branding, complimentary brands, marketing, strategy, synergy