When FIFA blew the World Cup open to 48 teams, the purists lost their minds. Dilution, they cried. Too many games, too many minnows, too much mediocrity flooding the sacred tournament. Dig chief strategy officer Peter Cerny argues that it’s the same word, said in the same wounded tone, that is quietly keeping your brand small.
The complaint is always the same shape. More teams, more “meaningless” fixtures, a lower average standard. A bloated 104-match schedule stuffed with sides the connoisseurs deem unworthy of the stage.
And then the tournament actually started. The expansion has produced more upsets, more first-time qualifiers, fuller stadiums and better stories than the tidy version ever did — Cape Verde holding mighty Spain, debutant nations giving the whole thing its pulse. The “weak” teams didn’t dilute the spectacle. They enlarged it. The thing the purists were protecting got bigger, louder and more alive the moment they stopped guarding the door.
Now look at your own marketing meetings, because the exact same word is doing the exact same damage. The most common objection to growth, in every category, is “we don’t want to dilute the brand”. Translated, it means: don’t chase the casual buyer, the cheap occasion, the once-a-year customer, the not-our-kind-of-person. Keep it premium. Keep it pure. Keep it — and here’s the quiet part — small.
The evidence has been screaming the opposite since How Brands Grow. Growth comes overwhelmingly from penetration: reaching more buyers, especially the light and non-buyers, not from intensifying the loyalty of the heavy few.
Those “diluting” customers — the ones who buy once a year and don’t think about you in between — are, mathematically, where almost all your growth lives. The double jeopardy law again: bigger brands win precisely because they accumulate a long tail of barely-engaged, occasional, “unworthy” buyers. The minnows are the growth.
There is exactly one honest exception, and naming it makes the argument stronger rather than weaker. True scarcity brands — Ferrari, Hermès — derive part of their value from the fact you genuinely can’t have them. For that rarefied handful, restraint is the strategy.
For everyone else, “we don’t want to dilute” is almost always a fear of growth wearing the costume of standards. If you’re not deliberately capping your own supply to protect a price most people can never pay, you are not Hermès. You’re just nervous.
And the fame data twists the knife. System1’s effectiveness work shows that broad, emotional, widely-reached campaigns consistently out-earn narrow, tightly-targeted ones on profit. Going broad isn’t a dilution of the brand. It’s the entire engine of it.
The purists will always sneer — at the 48-team tournament, the supermarket sub-brand, the unapologetically mass campaign. Let them sneer. The expanded tournament is more watched, more talked about and more loved than the pristine little version they’re nostalgic for. Dilution, it turns out, is just growth that snobs disapprove of.
Peter Cerny is the chief strategy officer and partner of the advertising agency Dig.
