Live From Fast Forward: Branding is an Attitude, Says Hefner

“The word brand is mostly overused,” said Christie Hefner, chairman and chief executive officer, Playboy Enterprises. “To me a brand is an attitude about life that is sufficiently strong for the consumer — that the brand can extend itself from its core product to other products that consumers can self-identify with.”

She was delivering the luncheon keynote at the Direct Marketing Association’s Fast Forward conference at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York Wednesday.

Starting in 1982, when she became president of Playboy, she embarked on efforts to extend the company’s brand to other media, a move she saw as necessary to the long-term survival of the Chicago-based company. [And that was after she decided to shed some money-losing businesses.]

“So the first opportunity for growth we identified was cable television,” she said. “We were lucky the pay TV revolution was taking off then.”

But she warned against trying to directly lift content from one medium onto another.

“The odds of being successful are against you,” she said.

She also said that Playboy TV’s success during the 1980s and 1990s gave Playboy the “confidence to go online.”

The company launched Playboy.com in 1994. Unlike other magazines at the time, she says, Playboy chose not to license out its content to Internet service providers because it did not want to give up control of what its content would look like.

In addition to all this, Hefner noted that Playboy has extended it brand through product licensing arrangements, which has been made easier by the fact the company has 15 million readers per month internationally.

But she said she’s been careful about what exactly to license out, rejecting an idea for Playboy-themed air fresheners once.