What business are you really in? How brands find new growth opportunities

Ask a room full of executives what business they’re in and most will name their category. We sell gum. We make crayons. We build customer engagement software. These are perfectly reasonable answers, but they say very little about why customers choose those products or what else the business might be capable of delivering.

Businesses can find growth beyond their product category by looking more closely at the needs they serve. For Victoria Lozano, former CMO of Crayola and Fast Company’s 2025 CMO of the Year, that thinking influences how she manages established consumer brands and identified opportunities to build entirely new businesses.

Categories help companies measure their performance against competitors and understand the markets they serve. They also influence how leaders allocate investment. When a business defines itself too narrowly, opportunities that sit outside its established category can be difficult to recognize, even when the company already has the capabilities or customer relationships to pursue them.

A September 2025 McKinsey analysis of 1,303 companies found that businesses moving into faster-growing industry segments delivered more than twice the returns of those remaining in their existing niches over the preceding decade. Fewer than 10% of the companies studied made such a move. 

The role of marketing leadership is also expanding. At PepsiCo, Mustafa Shamseldin took on the combined role of Category Growth Officer and CMO for International Foods in 2023. His responsibilities extended beyond conventional brand management into product innovation, commercialization, and the wider economics of growth. As McKinsey documented, the role brought functions such as R&D and supply chain closer to marketing, with performance measured against commercial outcomes.

Victoria has spent much of her career applying this broader commercial thinking to some of the world’s most familiar consumer brands.

How established brands find new growth opportunities

Earlier in her career at Cadbury, Victoria managed a portfolio that included Dentyne and Trident. Both were chewing gum brands, competing for similar consumers and retail shelf space. From a conventional category perspective, there was considerable overlap. Victoria saw two brands serving different needs.

Trident was positioned around oral care, offering consumers a way to maintain their teeth between brushing. Dentyne’s functional benefit was fresh breath, but its emotional appeal was the confidence people wanted in close personal connections. Although both competed in gum, the customer motivations behind each were quite different.

Speaking on the In Other Words podcast, Victoria explains how this broader understanding of each brand influenced its commercial potential. It allowed her to evaluate opportunities for product development and partnerships according to the role each brand played in consumers’ lives, and to make more informed decisions about investment across the portfolio.

Understanding the different needs a brand serves can influence which opportunities a company pursues and where it invests.

A 2025 Boston Consulting Group study examined portfolio changes at 583 large companies between 2010 and 2020. One approach was expansion into adjacent markets that could draw on existing brands, technology, supply networks, or customer relationships.

BCG found no statistical relationship between the scale of a company’s portfolio changes and its relative shareholder returns. The research also identified financial discipline and protecting the core business among the practices associated with stronger performance.

Crayola already enjoyed 99% brand awareness in the US and held a dominant position in arts and crafts. Yet its association with creativity offered opportunities well beyond crayons and markers. The brand could play a role in children’s entertainment and education, become the foundation for physical experiences, and support new licensing businesses.

Under Victoria’s leadership, Crayola expanded into location-based attractions drawing approximately 1.5 million visitors annually, while developing opportunities in entertainment, digital content, and licensing. This expansion gave consumers new ways to engage with Crayola and created additional opportunities for commercial growth.

The common foundation was creativity. That gave the company a way to assess whether a new business or partnership belonged within the Crayola brand, even when the product or experience looked very different from its traditional offering.

Victoria describes the value of a clear brand narrative in commercial terms. It gives leaders a basis for assessing where a brand can credibly expand, which partnerships fit, and how new ventures contribute to the wider business.

How global brands balance consistency with local relevance

Expanding the role of a brand becomes more complicated when the business operates internationally. An idea that connects strongly with consumers in its home market may carry different associations elsewhere, particularly when it draws on cultural expectations or the way people express emotion and form relationships.

Consider Dentyne’s positioning around confidence and personal connection. The underlying human motivation may be widely understood, but the way a brand communicates that idea will vary according to local attitudes and social conventions. A campaign or customer experience developed for one market cannot necessarily be reproduced elsewhere without adaptation.

Jason Hemingway, CMO of Phrase and host of In Other Words, explores this issue in a recent article for CMO Alliance, arguing that “Globalization is no longer an extension of the plan. It is the plan.”

At Crayola, the same principle applied across very different audiences. The brand needed to connect with children while also earning the confidence of parents and educators. Each audience had different reasons to care about creativity, although the brand’s underlying purpose remained consistent.

She describes the approach as borrow and build. Individual teams draw on an established brand narrative and develop its expression for the audience and experience they are responsible for. What creativity means to a five-year-old engaging with an app will differ from what it means to a teacher using Crayola resources in the classroom.

Those audience differences become more pronounced across international markets. A local team may understand that a particular message, experience, or creative execution needs to change, while the central brand organization remains responsible for protecting the overall positioning.

That places a premium on clear decision rights and early input from people who understand the local audience. Strong local ideas may also be worth adopting elsewhere in the business.

Making that approach work across multiple markets places greater demands on content operations. Teams need access to consistent brand guidance and the ability to adapt communications without repeatedly rebuilding the underlying content or approval processes.

Customer engagement platform Braze faced a related challenge as it expanded internationally. The company needed to manage increasing volumes of platform content and customer communications while maintaining quality across languages.

By centralizing its language operations through Phrase, Braze improved coordination across teams and introduced more consistent processes for managing multilingual content. Within 12 months, it entered four new markets and reported an increase of more than 200% in platform adoption in Japan.

Where should established brands invest for growth?

For executive teams, established categories provide useful boundaries. They make it easier to evaluate market share, assess competitors, and compare performance. But those boundaries can also influence assumptions about where future revenue will come from.

Victoria’s experience suggests that leaders should spend more time examining the needs their businesses serve and the assets they already possess. At Cadbury, identifying the different customer motivations behind two competing gum brands informed decisions about how each could develop. At Crayola, a broader understanding of creativity supported investment in businesses that extended far beyond the company’s original products.

Neither approach removes the need for commercial discipline. A broader definition of a brand creates possibilities, but leaders still need to establish which opportunities are credible, whether the organization has the capabilities to pursue them, and how the investment will deliver a return.

International growth brings another consideration. If the brand’s underlying idea is intended to support expansion across markets, local relevance and the systems needed to deliver it should influence the investment decision from the beginning.

Before approving the next growth plan, leadership teams should consider whether the way they define their business reflects the full value customers see in the brand. It is a question Victoria raises during her conversation on In Other Words, and one worth putting to every executive team.

What business are you really in?