Pleasing? Yes. But Harry Styles’ brand extension still leaves me wanting more

Mature brands often hit a ceiling in their original category. If you’re Gillette, for example, it’s painfully difficult to increase your global market penetration among the already well-shaved masses. Defensive marketing becomes the order of the day. Unless, of course, you extend the brand into toiletries and discover another billion pounds of additional annual revenue. That’s a whisker over 10% more money for Gillette.

Not bad, but some brand extensions often end up surpassing the original category.

Apple continues to dazzle with Mac revenues, but even the expected $30bn it’ll generate this year is dramatically overshadowed by the $200bn from iPhone sales. Despite its name, heritage and origin story, Amazon will make less than 4% of its sales from books this year, the rest, as Jeff Bezos famously realized, from being “the everything store.”

This kind of extension-fueled growth is obviously seductive. But there’s another reason why brand extension is the ultimate reward for building a brand: most categories eventually die, shrink, or get disrupted. It’s a matter of marketing time, and when those categories collapse, even the biggest brands go down with them. Once upon a time, there were legendary brands in fine china, ice deliveries, floppy disks, pipe tobacco, and lanterns, now all consigned to history. These big fish perished as their ponds dried up or were diverted.

When a brand extends into a new category, it not only opens up incremental growth but also increases the probability of long-term corporate survival. For nearly 200 years, the venerable Wolverhampton firm of Chubb made its fortune exclusively from manufacturing keys and locks. Until an astute anonymous mid-century manager made the crucial decision to leverage Chubb’s global reputation for safety into new categories that, frankly, have fuck all to do with smelting small bits of metal. Chubb moved into fire safety, electronic security, logistics, and building surveillance. When the arse fell out of the lock and key market, thanks to Chinese competition, Chubb was secure, diversified, and thriving.

And that brings us back to Harry Styles and his sex toys after an undoubtedly long, circuitous, but entirely appropriate preamble. Young Harry, you see, isn’t all that young any more. He first graced our screens on The X Factor back in 2010. Now comfortably in his thirties, his last album dropped more than three years ago. His original fans? They’re sleepless parents, not shrieking teens. In the capricious hurricane of modern music, he’s closer to an encore than an introduction.

Of course, he can still tour. His live gigs netted him a cool £50m profit last year, an impressive sum by anyone’s reckoning. But Harry, surely, senses that without fresh music, both his appeal and commercial tour potential will gradually ebb. One can assume there’s a bankable reunion with his old band mates queued up for 2035, but until then, let’s be honest: he will know only one direction, downwards.

But our young Harry is cannier than most pop stars. Having recently charmed the beauty sector with his Pleasing brand, Styles and his team have spotted an aching gap in a potentially huge category: vibrators. Or, if you were born after 1980, “sex toys.” Or after 2000, “sexual wellness.” Or after 2010? Well, you’d better ask your mum.

On the surface, the jump from pop sensation to purveyor of sexual pleasure might seem, well, a little obtuse, but that is the nature of successful brand extension; rarely does it make immediate sense. There’s a fabulous old New York Times piece from 1998, dripping with skepticism, about whether Amazon could possibly sell anything but books. I can only imagine the Brummie eye-rolling when Chubb diversified in the sixties. And who could forget Steve Ballmer’s infamous guffaw at the iPhone unveiling? Brand extensions never seem plausible until, suddenly, they’re obvious.

Pleasing Yourself, a sub-brand of Pleasing, is Harry’s plunge into sexual wellness. It is in every sense the right kind of new entry, boasting all the hallmarks of a near-perfect brand extension. For starters, he remains a global, newsworthy figure, almost instantly recognized and written about by the media on a daily basis. He could launch a line of bin bags, and the press would cover it.

But awareness is not enough.

After all, our prime minister is more famous than Harry Styles, but no one’s queuing up for the Starmer Cock Ring, not even Labour die-hards. The real lightning rod is the set of associations Styles stirs up among these salient consumers. To put it bluntly, Harry comes across as rather accomplished in the bedroom department –and not in a brash, Tom Jones, notches-on-the-bedpost sort of way. Yes, there’s been a parade of high-profile partners, but Styles has handled it with remarkable discretion, warmth, and metrosexual aplomb. Unlike the musical Casanovas of yesteryear, Harry Styles is a sensitive soul, open about the burdens of sexuality, fluid in his orientation, and refreshingly reverent towards female pleasure. A man utterly, thrillingly, of the moment.

@kennyhadidd #model #runway #singer #viral #fyp #edit #harrystyles #victoriassecretfashionshow #vsfs #gentleman #parati #angel ♬ sonido original - love

From the lyrics of ‘Watermelon Sugar’ (clearly not about watermelons, or sugar), to his famously respectful appearance at the Victoria’s Secret show, standing out from every leering, misogynist star who’d strutted onstage before him, Harry is the man every 21st-century hipster wants to be, and the one most women wouldn’t mind spending a night (or two) with. Much like his double-sided vibrator, Harry can work both ends of the market.

He’s “trouble,” according to Taylor Swift. Still “a good friend,” to Kendall Jenner. And full of “humility and grace,” according to Olivia Wilde. Read between all these lines, and it’s also crystal clear that he’s a fantastic shag. That’s always a virtue (trust me), but for a fading pop star surveying a pivot into sexual wellness, it’s a platform quivering with lucrative potential. He’s got the awareness and, crucially, the associations to truly pull this off.

Of course, none of it matters if the product doesn’t deliver. I was mad keen on Kylie Minogue’s prosecco until I tried it. Christ in a bucket, what a sham. But, again, Styles and his team are several rungs above your average musical chancer. Collaborating with Zoë Ligon, a respected sex educator, was a shrewd play. The high-design aesthetics of the ‘Pleasing Yourself’ line are genuinely notable. I’ve seen some pretty intimidating double-ended dildos in my time, I can tell you, but the new Pleasing Yourself vibrator (£68) is more objet d’art than adult implement. Bundling it with lubricant (£25) and scented candles (£80) frames it as so much more than a mere tool; it’s a whole sensual experience.

The brand’s stated ambition?

To “explore sexual wellness through a lens of emotional depth, cultural fluency, joy and pleasure, and genuine care.” Slap those words on Harry Styles, drench them in fawning editorial coverage, broadcast it to both men and women, and you’ve got yourself a licence to print money.

But there’s another crucial element to the sexy success of Styles’ new brand extension. Yes, he’s salient. Yes, he’s congruent. And yes, I can confirm after diligent product testing that his ding dong bangs every gong. But he’s also executed an especially clever move with this diversification: he’s targeted a category marked with weakness.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a column about Virgin Cola, Richard Branson’s much-ballyhooed entry into fizzy drinks. At the time, I argued that, despite boasting the right brand associations (fun and value) and a product that beat everything in blind taste tests, Virgin’s entry into the cola category was strategic madness because of who was waiting for it. Coca-Cola and Pepsi on their home turf. And that does not mention the British supermarket private labels, which are the best in the world. Virgin Cola was going to get fucked – and not in a loving Harry Styles way. The lesson should be clear: just because a brand has the equity to extend into a category, it doesn’t mean that it should. Good marketers look first behind the curtain of any new category to assess incumbents because their weakness will be just as big a part of your success as your strength.

Harry Styles has chosen a high-value, high-growth category that perfectly fits his brand. But he deserves special strategic kudos for also ensuring he has picked a category without any dominant or even particularly strong existing players.

Who are your top three favorite sexual wellness brands?

Yeah.

Me neither.

The only marketing criticism I can level at Harry and his team concerns the P-Spot...

Pricing.

After a breathless launch in the UK and US, the product immediately sold out, and now the website is utterly bare, with no indication of when stock will return. ‘Coming soon’ must be an incredibly frustrating message for a great many consumers.

Naturally, there’s a whole generation of undertrained marketers out there who believe that selling out is always a good thing because it’ll “go viral” and “get people talking.” I’d suggest they’re missing a rather significant chunk of marketing logic. They should be focusing on helping the brand go beyond virality, toward the far more important objective of “making fuck tons of money”, by being better at marketing, not just advertising.

Selling out instantly at £68 is all very lovely. But selling all but one of your vibrators at £199 is a considerably more arousing outcome. Nothing breaks a proper marketer’s heart like a “sold out” sign. Because while it may point to a marketing team that can promote and advertise a product, it also highlights a lack of focus on rarer, more valuable marketing skills like pricing and a focus on profitability. Harry charges more for his candle than his vibrator, which is, frankly, daft. Going to market without properly researched pricing is even dafter. For all his team’s expertise in aesthetics, advertising, product design and PR, it’s clear that Harry Styles has fucked himself with pricing.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and seven-time winner of the PPA’s Columnist of the Year. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA, which teaches marketers, among other things, how to price a product properly. The final course kicks off next week, and places are still available. Turn you on Harry?

Help Mark choose his column topic at The Drum Live September 24/25. Tickets here.

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