In the entrepreneurial and startup worlds, life is of course often more exciting than that, living life on the sharp edge of the margin as so many do.
Well-established businesses offer a window into future life for startups and undergo peaks and troughs all of their own.
When more well-established businesses have reached a certain level in their development, the minds at the heart of the business, which often remain entrepreneurial in their nature, will often try to extend their offering to new markets, new territories, new audiences and sometimes even new sectors.
But these moves are often fraught with danger. If you bear in mind that only 15-20% of new consumer products succeed, then it becomes even more essential that you get exactly right whatever breakout offering you are proposing from your current product or service sets.
How to diversify, when to diversify and with what new product or service are the key questions that every business needs to thoroughly consider.
Selecting the solutions to these questions is the most delicate of sciences. And pretty much everyone gets one wrong at some point.
A good example to reach for is how McDonalds consistently trial and launch new products. Disasters of product diversification that McDonalds have presided over in the past include the launches of the McPizza and, wait for it, McSpaghetti too. On the successful side though, McDonalds can point towards their McCafe concept which has created a new space for them to operate in and reach an audience who might not normally consider the brand. (McCafes are not to be confused with McAfee of course, but actually the way that anti-viral providers like AVG diversify their product sets for business and domestic clients is a useful guide point in this exercise).
If you are going to expand your range of services and product, the first thing to bear in mind is how to transfer your core values of your brand into the next proposition.
Integral to that is how you identify commonality between your product and its extension; your existing audience and the new audience or segment you are going to target.
The danger is that you create a product which is too close to your existing one and its appeal eats into the audience you have established - cannibalising it and leaving your market share exposed to circling competitors. You certainly don't want that.
Of course, how you position your new product to your current customer base is crucial. You can muddy the waters of your relationship and brand loyalty if you begin to introduce potentially confusing elements into the carefully crafted dynamic.
Similarly, consumers can suss pretty quickly if you have little confidence in your current product and are chancing your arm on something else. Consumer loyalty tends to gravitate towards products and services which are robustly presented and obviously supported. More mercurial brands whose focus chops and changes too readily, tend to give consumers the heebie-jeebies, and they stay away.
Which brings me to my final point: timing is crucial. The introduction of new ranges or diversifications can bomb disastrously if consumer confidence in your brand or sector is already low, your other sales have not shown recent strength, or when there are other forces at work in the market which can undermine your launch.
Introduce new offerings slowly. Test them out in microcosm first before you scale up. Make sure you have done a thorough tactical assessment of timing and market outlook. And don't throw easy meat to the cannibals.
