Cathedral City: A Line Extension Done Right

This week’s Innovation Of The Week comes from Cathedral City cheddar and gives us an opportunity to talk line extensions. How do you find a line extension that works, letting you keep the elements that make your brand distinctive and successful while not cannibalising your existing products? 

It’s something Test Your Innovation (TYI) is particularly good at spotting. A TYI Star Rating is based on a combination of individual emotional response and market-oriented ‘wisdom of crowds’ prediction via a “share-buying game”. That makes it sensitive to line extension concepts that people instinctively recognise as too weird or too similar to the parent brand. 

Cathedral City, on the other hand, are building on what they’re best known for – strong, tasty cheddar cheese – and finding new ways to deliver it. The concept we’re looking at is for a pair of new Cathedral City formats: a cheese string “peeler” and a pot of spreadable Cathedral City. 

These are products consumers will already be familiar with from other cheese brands – spreadable cheese portions and cheese strings have been staples of children’s lunch boxes for decades. But it’s also true that the existing options can be rather bland and tasteless – far away from the rich real cheese flavour Cathedral City brings. 

From the Test Your Innovation diagnostics, we can see how real consumers latch on to these ideas. The new products are seen as especially appealing to children in the “Predicted Target” chart – though importantly they’re not exclusively for kids, people predict above average appeal for adults too. Meanwhile the comments specifically call out the flavour as the reason these new ideas are an improvement on existing cheese snacks: “Wonderful spreadable cheese with more flavour” and “Like a cheesestring with real cheese” are two of the Advantages people found. 

Looking at the Implicit Attributes chart, where people quickly indicate whether the new idea matches each adjective, it’s clear that Cathedral City’s existing brand equity is the biggest asset here. The new product gets only average scores on “innovative” and “unique” but way over the norm on “Trustworthy”, “High Quality” and “Recognisable”. 

In other words, this is a type of product people already know but brought to them by a brand they trust and see as higher quality than the current options. You couldn’t ask for a sweeter line extension spot. 

And the overall metrics bear that out – this is a very strong 4.8-Star innovation. It does particularly well on emotional response and on the share trading game (with 69% of people saying they’d buy shares in the idea). It’s an example of a line extension done right – extending a quality the brand is known for (taste and flavour) into areas where people are looking for those options. Testing reveals that.