TV Show Spin-Offs Can Teach Us A lot

Most of the time I can’t sleep at night.  You know how you play association games on long car rides with family or friends?  Well, sometimes I do the same thing with myself to help me fall asleep.  (I never said I was normal.)  So last night as I was trying to fall into a slumber, something made me think of That 70s Show.  Then I thought of That 80s Show, the spin-off of the nostalgic decade program.  So, I repeated the process, thinking of shows that had spin-offs. 

The first spin-off I remember was Just the Ten of Us.  The coach from Growing Pains (starring every 80s girl’s crush, Kirk Cameron) was moving his large family to a new city.  Then I remembered around the same time The Cosby Show spun-off to a Different World, where Denise went off to college.  In a real deep tidbit of TV trivia that my cube neighbor and walking-pop-culture-encyclopedia Justin Verry didn’t even know, Family Matters was a spin-off of Perfect Strangers- Harriette Winslow was the elevator operator.  (And did you know that lovable “Balky”, Bronson Pinchot actually lives about 40 miles north of Solid Cactus World Headquarters?!)

Question: What does all this have to do with e-commerce and why the heck is this insomniac girl talking about her favorite childhood television shows? 

Answer:  Because it shows that just like television show creators do, e-commerce business owners can take a successful brand and formula and branch it into something totally new.  Expanding the the brand!

Think about it.  A successful show like Cheers has a great following.  Everyone loves the astute barfly Fraiser and his special brand of humor.  So why not build a new show around a well-liked character.  It’s something totally new, yet has a sense of familiarity.  Maybe it even caters to a new audience, reaching more and more people. 

In e-commerce you can do the same thing.  At our recent boot camp, one of our clients realized the potential to do this and he may very well branch out soon.  He has a site that caters to a specific industry, yet there are so many niches within this.  Other reasons to branch out are to A/B test prices and offers.  So, you have a flagship site, take a great-selling product and make it into it’s own site. 

Here is a great article from a recent eBiz Insider magazine about this very topic of expanding your brand: http://www.ebizinsider.com/2008/09/03/send-in-the-clones/

And if you have some downtime today and are wondering just how many television shows were spin-offs– check out this Wikipedia article.