With four of the world’s leading fishing boat brands — Ranger, Champion, Stratos and Triton — Platinum Equity needed a clear brand portfolio strategy to help grow the category and sell more boats.

Situation

To the uninformed, bass boats all look the same. Walk around the BassMaster Classic and the dozen or so established brands are all sleek, sparkly machines, sporting aggressive Evinrude, Yamaha or Mercury engines. They all look to be made of the same materials to the same specifications.

But if you know anything about bass boats, they’re really quite different in myriad, important ways that in the end attract and satisfy different customers. They are all made to differing performance specs through differing underlying manufacturing processes. Philosophically, they all take a unique view on the comfort vs. speed equation. And they all make their own choices in fit, finish and human factors.

But for a category that will live or die by its ability to bring in new customers, the physical features aren’t enough to create true differentiation. The key is customer segmentation and brand positioning.

Fortunately, brand matters. The fishermen who buy top end bass boats are passionately loyal. They will happily rattle off the attributes of their favorite brand, singing their boat’s praises in surprisingly emotional language. The challenge, we quickly discovered, is to bring those brand attributes forward.

With four leading brands, we needed to tap into the true brand loyalty that would enable the company to avoid confusing the customer and cannibalizing its business.

Solution

After analyzing the competition, speaking with dealers and getting to know the customer set, our approach was to look to the customer and build on the historical brand differences in the market. We developed a strategy that would allow each of the brands to fulfill a profitable, defined niche:

• Ranger, the market leader, maintained its positioning at the top of the pile as the “authentic legend.” This strategy acknowledged what many fishermen told us (and what Ranger has long believed): “There are two kinds of people in the world — those who have a Ranger and those who want one.”
• Stratos was repositioned as a genuine flanker brand, with attitude and personality to spare. Stratos became the “Soul of a Predator,” an in-your-face brand designed specifically for the performance-driven crowd. The unofficial Stratos tagline became “Step Up or Step Back”.
• Champion took on a completely new role, becoming a product series at the top of the Stratos line. This avoided cutting the market too thin and enabled the company to keep its valuable relationship with tournament fisherman Skeet Reese.
• Triton was retained as the approachable, adventurous brand with the Mercury engines.

In addition to defining the go-to-market brands, we helped establish best-in-class brand management practices to ensure that differentiation — in product, design, marketing and support — would be maintained over the long run.

You don’t have to be an expert anymore to tell a Ranger from a Stratos from a Triton. If you know the brand, you know the boat.