All excellent points, Jon, and thank you for raising them. Obviously, the topic isn’t quite as black-and-white as my blog suggests. Nor can I do your questions full justice here. What follows is an attempt at doing them partial justice...

On watering down the brand: Starbucks feared that selling sandwiches would do just that. But they relented in the face of customer demand and emerged better off for it. Similarly, rather than protest, “We’re a burger place, period,” McDonald’s has added chicken, salads and breakfasts. One more example: When Doc Pemberton concocted Coca-Cola, the whole idea was to provide Georgians with a caffeinated beverage to enjoy cold in place of hot coffee in the heat of summer. (Yes, he also thew in cocaine for good measure.) Yet when enough people in the market demanded it, voila, there was caffeine-free Coke. Oddly enough, none of these weakened Starbucks, McDonald’s or Coke as brands. I suspect this is because, in each case, the core values of each brand remained intact. (An analysis of those core values would be an article in its own right.) New Coke, apparently, assaulted the core values head-on.

On the other hand, it IS possible to water down a brand. Trying to please everyone is the antithesis of branding. Since having a brand entails defining who your customer IS, it follows that it also entails defining who your customer is NOT. Hence we have yet to see a disposable Mont Blanc pen. And, speaking of pens, Bic disposable underwear—I’m not making this up—was a market failure. So was McDonald’s clothing for kids. And (and herewith I suppress a gag reflex) Colgate frozen dinners.

But suppose the market demands what is truly at odds with your core values. What to do? One solution is to introduce a new brand. Back to Coke. When the market demanded a clear, lemon-lime soda, Coke didn’t introduce Lemon-Lime Coke Clear. They introduced Sprite. Similarly, Toyota launched Lexus and Sion instead of trying to stretch the Toyota brand too far. PF Chang’s introduced Pei Wei. Yet the ownership of Sprite, Lexus, Sion and Pei Wei is no secret.

The Phillip Morris Company deliberately weakened—or did it strengthen?—its brand by changing its name to Altria and relegating its tobacco lines to subsidiary status. Call me a cynic, but somehow I suspect the move had something to do with a fear of apparent incongruity after their acquisition of the allegedly heart-healthy breakfast cereal brand known as Post.

On marketers thinking they know what people want at the risk of getting it wrong: That’s a big danger. For that reason, I urge clients to test and watch what people do, rather ask them to predict their own behavior—which no one can do with any degree of reliability.

On James Cameron, or, for that matter, Hollywood in general: Funny you should mention — I was just discussing this very topic at length with friends. I know of no way to reliably test a movie without actually making it. Short of that, all a movie studio can do is infer. It can track box office trends, watch book sales, test storyboards, hold focus groups, etc., etc. But none of these is a sure-fire predictor. Until the movie is on screens and people either do or don’t pay to see it, despite all its experience, Hollywood never quite knows what will fly or flop.

—Steve Cuno