What if the guy who trims your hedges also came in and gave your eyebrows a wax?
It is a business with more shopfronts than Myers – but Jim’s Mowing (and now Jim’s Beauty) seems to have found the ultimate brand extension with its latest venture, write academics Edwina Luck and Nicholas Grech
Jimās Group ā best known for Jimās Mowing and Jimās Plumbing ā this week announced a surprising brand extension.
Itās Jimās Beauty, offering āprofessional beauty treatments in the comfort of your chosen spaceā.
Itās surprising because Jimās Group got its start mowing lawns, then extended into related businesses, including dog washing, pest control and roofing.
These services are usually offered in the clientās home, and are provided by franchisees, as will the beauty services ā which will include facial, lash and brow and nail treatments, as well as waxing and teeth whitening.
It isnāt a joke, although it has been greeted on social media as one, and was once the plot of a TV comedy sketch.
You might like
Brands often try to extend their āhaloā to cover other fields, hoping to capitalise on goodwill and stay relevant in a changing world.
Fast food giant McDonaldās is a leader, introducing McCafes in 1993, salads and wraps in the 2000s, and more recently adding plant-based and vegan meals.
Coles and Woolworths have diversified into just about every product there is by selling their own generic home brands.
This has allowed them to undercut other brands and get more margin ā a strategy that is paying off as consumers become more stretched, allowing Coles to increase home brand sales 9.4% and Woolworths 7.8% over the past year.
Stay informed, daily
Even their delivery services can be thought of as brand extensions. Away from their physical stores, they are offering telehealth, insurance, mobile phone plans, gift cards, and deliveries at work.
Brand extensions work where there is brand alignment ā where the extension is true to the image of the brand and doesnāt devalue it.
Among some of the most infamous failures are Harley-Davidson perfume, Bic underwear, Cosmopolitan yogurt and Colgate beef lasagna.
Sometimes the extreme strangeness of an extension can create a buzz around a faded company, even if its sales bomb.
Cadbury briefly introduced Vegemite chocolate in 2015, but then said it hadnāt been serious. What it had wanted to do was to āgenerate talkā about rediscovering favourite flavours.
Industry researcher IBISWorld says Australiaās beauty industry is characterised by āmarket saturation and the wholehearted acceptance of its products by consumersā, which isnāt a good sign for Jimās.
But IBISWorld says sales of beauty products are overwhelmingly through physical stores with ānew channelsā (mainly online) accounting for only 13.8% ā which suggests there is room for growth in face-to-face sales aligned with services.
Jim Penman started Jimās Mowing as a side business in 1982 while studying for a PhD in history. He turned it into a franchise in 1989 and then extended the idea to franchises including Jimās Cleaning, Jimās Building Inspections, Jimās Fencing, Jimās Antennas, Jimās Pest Control and Jimās Dog Wash.
A blog on a Jimās Group website describes it as a āgo-to for a plethora of servicesā. But they are all associated with the guy who used to have the beard ā the tradie.
His success, or failure, in moving into beauty will help answer one of the enduring questions in business strategy: just because you can, does that mean you should?
Edwina Luck is Senior Lecturer at QUT Business School, Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, Queensland University of Technology. Nicholas Grech is Sessional Academic and PhD Candidate, Queensland University of Technology. This article first appeared in The Conversation and is republished here under Creative Commons Licence
Want to see more stories from InDaily Qld in your Google search results?
- Click here to set InDaily Qld as a preferred source.
- Tick the box next to "InDaily Qld". That's it.
