If you take the Ansoff matrix at face value – and follow the “safer” Z sequence, you would never jump straight to a diversification strategy.

Does Richard Branson care? Hardly. He’d probably point to a Harvard study that found that there is no correlation between companies with a strategy and business success. If anything, companies with a fixed strategy can’t change course and are bound by CEO dogma and of-course-it’ll-work pride.

Branson – sorry, Sir Richard Branson – has gone from organising hippy concerts in fields to setting up a record company, airlines, trains, credit cards, advertising services, cola … you name it.

Website screenshot – click to enlarge

Big brand in the UK: Virgin Cola

But for any of this to work, you need to build on something (sorry: that’s plain English for “leverage synergies”). But few of the areas Branson branches out into are related.

Flying high: Virgin

So what is the Branson “synergy” that all of this is built on? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just the Virgin image. A belief his customers have in the product if it’s got Branson behind it? Faith in a self-made millionaire? Certainly, this brand would have none of the clout outside the UK. Maybe we Brits like a local hero and that’s what we buy into when we buy Virgin.

But whatever it is, Branson needs no matrix.