In the midst of a fairly heated argument on Scott Miller’s blog about Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, an interesting question arose: Is Worlds of Warcraft one of the largest marketing blunders in gaming history? Some background: there is an art and a science to branding, of which Scott Miller is one of the tragically few people in games development to really embrace. According to many passionate about branding, the recent rash of flavored varieties of sodas has been a mistake – including, say, Diet Coke.

Posh, I say (I talk like that). Diet Coke was an excellent example of successful brand extension. Coca-Cola’s previous diet soda, Tab, had hit a glass ceiling – it just couldn’t seem to get through. Diet Coke broke through that ceiling, and became the number two soda on the market (after Coke). Coca-Cola’s market share grew overall, even though sales of Coke Classic dropped.

What’s more, I argued, C2 is an excellent example of when they SHOULD have used the Coke brand, but didn’t. What IS C2? Don’t you think it would have sold better if it had been called “Low Carb Coke”? For that matter, what IS ‘Pepsi Blue’, ‘Crystal Pepsi’, and ‘Mountain Dew: Pitch Black’? At least with ‘Diet Coke’, you knew what it was: the cola you always knew and loved, only it wouldn’t give you a fat ass.

How this ties into games is pretty apparent. There is little question that licenses are brands, and that a bad license extension can devalue a brand. But a lot of this means getting down to what a brand really MEANS. For example, Command and Conquer means ‘modern-era RTS’ to me. If the fans shared that opinion, C&C: Renegade was a massive brand misfiring.

If you think that Diet Coke should never have been made, then by extension, you also probably should believe that Ultima Online, Unreal: Tournament, and Duke Nukem 3D should never have been made. However, what these brands mean to the fans is broader than that: “Ultima” is about open-ended, sandlot-like play. “Unreal” is about the best possible 3D engine. “Duke Nukem” was about a fun character, action-oriented gameplay, and campy humor. All three of those were, in my opinion, appropriate growths of the licenses, and all three paid dividends for their license holders.

What’s more, the value of brands is finding ways to grow them intelligently – intelligently being the operative term. “Tom Clancy” as a brand once meant “Tactical Modern-Day Team-based FPS”. But they expanded the definition to include Splinter Cell, which isn’t Team-Based, but which succeeded tremendously (partially by sub-branding to help keep the gameplay distinct). They probably could expand it even further to include other titles, if they were careful. I vote for ‘Clancy Tactics GBA’, a turn-based tactics game. But some things would definitely dilute the brand – making a C&C clone and slapping the Clancy name on it, for example.

Of course, some branding decisions look really smart or stupid in retrospect. Heroes of Might and Magic made a bet that “Might and Magic” to people meant something other than RPG – and they succeeded wildly, surpassing even the base RPG in sales. Then 3DO decided to expand to other genres – Legends of Might and Magic, Warriors of Might and Magic, Crusaders of Might and Magic – and drove the license into the dirt. Which brings up the cardinal rule of owning a brand – don’t ever, ever attach a beloved brand to a crappy product.

Which brings us to Worlds of Warcraft. Will it succeed? First, you have to look at what the title actually is. Personally, I associate ‘Warcraft’ with ‘Extremely well-balanced and well-polished RTS’. This was strengthened by the fact that ‘Starcraft’ strengthened the mental association that ‘*craft’ titles are RTSes. As such, the mental leap to MMO is one that the marketing crew will have to sell.

But let’s look at why ‘Diet Coke’ worked – you could tell at a glance what the product was, and how it differentiated from those products that you already owned and knew and loved. The other products I cited as good examples of brand extensions do the same: It’s Ultima, only Online. It’s Duke Nukem only 3D. It’s Unreal, only a Tournament. As such, it’s the World that Warcraft takes place in seems to pass the sniff test. In fact, if you’ve played Warcraft and said “I wonder what it’d be like to be down there on the ground”, it might be a pretty compelling selling point. It stands a pretty good chance of extending the brand so that Warcraft isn’t just an RTS license, but a Universe in its own right. So, in my opinion, Worlds of Warcraft makes their product brand extension transparent in their name, and as a result will probably work out just fine.

Starcraft: Ghost, on the other hand…