5 Ways CPG Brands Can Expand | CPG Expansion Strategies | Left Hand Agency CPG High Five

When we talk about CPG brands “expanding,” it’s easy to make it sound like the answer is always the same: launch more products.

But there are actually several different ways a brand can expand. Sometimes it enters an entirely new category. Sometimes it finds a new occasion. Sometimes it’s just a new flavor.  

Here are five of the most common forms of expansion:

1. Category Expansion

“We make X. Now we make Y.”

This is the most obvious kind of expansion, and it works when a brand borrows the trust it already built in one category to earn a shot at a totally different one. 

Chobani is the poster child. It built its name on Greek yogurt, then cashed in that “better for you” credibility to move into oat milk and coffee creamers. The move positioned Chobani as a food company, not a yogurt company.

Oatly pulled the same move from the other direction. It became the oat milk brand, then used that to launch ice cream and yogurt. Different formats, same underlying idea: Oatly owns “oats as a modern plant-based ingredient,” and that ownership travels.

Compare that to Allbirds, who sold off their actual shoe business earlier this year and rebranded as “NewBird AI” to lease cloud computing power to AI companies. A shoe brand with zero infrastructure experience, waking up one day and deciding it’s now in the GPU business. That’s not category expansion it’s just… strange.

What adjacent category could your brand step into that would feel like a natural fit to your customers? 

2. Occasion Expansion

You use us for X. Now use us for Y.”

Sometimes the growth isn’t in a new category - it’s expanding the moments in which a customer uses your brand.

Oreo has made a career out of this. The brand has spent years proving it can also be a milkshake mix-in (YUM), a dessert topping, a baking ingredient, or an ice cream flavor. The product barely changes. What changes is how many different moments in your day Oreo has convinced you it belongs in.

Gatorade did the same thing. It started as one very specific occasion, hydration during a game (especially Florida games!), and has spent years stretching that into before, during, and after any kind of physical activity. It’s also the unofficial drink of cold and flu season in our home.  

Here’s the part some people miss: sometimes you don’t have to invent the new occasion at all. Sometimes your consumers already found it for you, and your job is just to notice. Eggs are the simplest example I’ve got. Eggs are a breakfast food, full stop, that’s the whole category. Except somebody, somewhere, decided to boil a dozen, slice them in half, and turn them into deviled eggs, and now eggs are also a party food. A fancy schmancy one.  

What other moment in someone’s life could your brand naturally live in, and are your own customers already showing you the answer?

3. Format Expansion

You love us in X. Now we’re available in Y.”

Sometimes the product itself is fine. The problem is the format is boxing you into one occasion and nothing else.

RXBAR is a good one here. The brand built its whole reputation on being blunt about what’s in the bar (3 egg whites, no b.s., you know the label). But a bar is a bar. It’s not breakfast, it’s not really an afternoon snack unless you’re the kind of person who eats standing over the sink (or in my case… at my desk), and it’s definitely not something you’re bringing to brunch. So RXBAR took that same “here’s exactly what’s in it” promise and moved it into protein oatmeal and snack bites, basically giving people more windows in the day to buy into the brand without asking them to change what they actually want from it.

What’s the format doing that’s actually limiting who buys your brand or when they buy it?

4. Audience Expansion

“Our current customer loves us. Who else could?”

Sometimes a brand has already nailed the product. The next question isn’t what else to make, it’s who else might want the thing you’re already making. This is more of a marketing maneuver than a traditional expansion. 

I think about Stanley 1913 - Stanley cups were designed for rugged use - construction workers, tradespeople, outdoor enthusiasts. But suddenly the product went viral and women were using it as an everyday carry everywhere cup - and the sales exploded. Stanley leaned into this audience expansion hard - with new colors and designs. 

Dove is a different kind of audience expansion. Decades of built up trust with women in personal care, then it took that same skin care and grooming expertise and built Dove Men+Care from scratch. Same brand DNA, same “real beauty, real care” positioning, just pointed at a completely different customer. (And if you haven’t been in Target recently - Men’s grooming products are having a moment - and Dove got there early). 

And then there’s the wrong way to do this, which is just making the exact same product but pink. BIC learned this one the hard way with “BIC for Her,” pens that were identical to regular BIC pens except they were pastel colored. To add to insult - the product was priced higher (for a gender that makes less money than men!) We already pay more at the dry cleaner to launder a button up shirt! Enough. Anyhow, that’s not audience expansion, that’s just a markup with a paint job. The internet didn’t respond kindly.  

Who already wants what you offer, but isn’t buying your brand because it wasn’t built with them in mind?  

5. Line Expansion

“You love this. Here’s more of it.”

This is probably the most common form of expansion in all of CPG, and it’s the one that gets underestimated the most because it looks too easy to be a real strategy.

Line expansion asks: what else can we add to the thing people already love?

Oreo is basically the case study everyone points to, and for good reason. Original Oreo led to Double Stuf, Golden Oreo, a rotating cast of seasonal and limited edition flavors, and it just keeps going. We are fans of their Fourth of July version with pop rocks inside! Every new version gives people a reason to come back to the brand without asking them to understand anything new about what Oreo is.

Doritos runs the same play and runs it well. Nacho Cheese built the whole franchise, then Cool Ranch, Flamin’ Hot, and an endless parade of limited-time flavors kept the core product exactly the same while giving people something new to try every few months. 

The upside of line expansion is that you don’t have to earn permission from scratch. People already get what the product is. They know your distinctive assets even with new iterations. All the newness has to do is give them a different way to experience something they already trust.

One more thing about line expansion: it doesn’t have to be a domestic-only game. Cross the border into Canada and Lay’s sells a Ketchup flavor that basically doesn’t exist here. Same brand, same core chip, completely different flavor lineup depending on which side of the border you’re standing on. If you’ve never gone flavor hunting in another country’s chip aisle, do it. It’s a fun little reminder that “line expansion” doesn’t have to mean the same rollout everywhere.

The strategic question is: What else can you build around the thing people already love about your brand?

And One More CPG Expansion Strategy: Repositioning

Repositioning isn’t technically expansion, since you don’t have to launch a single new thing to pull it off. You’re just changing what the brand means in people’s heads. Marketing lives for these moments!

Old Spice is the gold standard here. It went from “the cologne your grandpa wore” to one of the most quoted, meme’d, culturally relevant brands in the country, and it did it with zero new products. Just a completely different creative voice and the confidence to be genuinely weird and funny instead of playing it safe.

Abercrombie & Fitch pulled off something similar, just in the opposite direction. It walked away from its old identity, the heavily sexualized, teen-focused, dim-lit-mall-store version of itself, and repositioned as a more grown up, inclusive brand. Same company, completely different meaning.

The distinction is simple:

Expansion changes what you sell. Repositioning changes what people think you are.

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