I'm back. Your post had me thinking.
If you're in marketing, I'm sure that you've seen the graph below.
![Image](http://itsadeliverything.com/wordpress/images/Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle.png)
To me, if you're (hypothetically) marketing the boat under Hobie's name, you need to look at a few things:
First, do you want this to be a commercial success, or a technological success.
There's nothing wrong with a technological success that doesn't become a commercial success. Think of the Dodge Viper, or the Hobie Trifoiler. Both of those products showed what the brand can do in the performance realm of their industries. Neither of them sell (or were sold) in high volume. It's called a "Halo" product, something that shows what you can do, but doesn't have to sell in high volume to be considered a success, or to have a positive impact on your brand.
The Hobie Mirage Drive system was a totally new product. It was launched to the "innovators" in the graph above. The thing that nobody tells you in school when they show you this graph, is that innovators buy a lot of CRAP! Launching to innovators is a huge risk, it also means that you can't trade off of your brand image, just your brand name.
To me, your boat launches to Hobie's innovators. (It may fit another part of the graph in other markets, but to a Hobie owner, to buy your proposed boat, they'd be an innovator)
To achieve market success, (and not just technological success) and to be able to trade off of the Hobie brand image, and not just the Hobie brand name, you want to launch products in the Red Zone of that graph.
Think about Hobie's success since the innovative Mirage Drive. It succeeded in kayaks, so they added a sail and two amas. Suddenly you had a product that wasn't a kayak anymore, but to the kayaking crowd, it was familiar. You didn't need innovators to buy it because you were trading off the Hobie Brand, which meant that customers knew that Hobie could build quality kayaks, and quality sailing pieces and parts, so to combine them, they launched something new and different, but not totally foreign to their current market.
In essence, the Hobie Adventure Island was launched in the Red Zone, to the Early Adopters.
Next, Hobie had a lot of customers fishing from their mirage kayaks. They launched the Pro Angler. This was innovative enough that it didn't just replace what everyone in the Early and Late majority were using, but in fact it was a new boat. However it wasn't so new that they needed innovators to buy it. There were enough familiar pieces, that being the first to buy a Pro Angler made you an Early Adopter, and not an innovator.
Then there was the Tandem Island. Again, innovative, but familiar.
That's how you market a product using your Brand Image, and not just your Brand Name.
So your challenge is to market something familiar enough to Hobie Owners that they will recognize the pieces and parts, or the technology, but different enough that it creates a new product, and not just a replacement product.
If you launch to the innovators, you take a big risk at failure. If you launch to the Early and Late Majority, you cannibalize your market, and people only replace what they have, but your market share doesn't grow.
In the case that you state, you want to be launching to that Red Zone of Early Adopters. If it was easy, everyone would do it!
I hope that helps a little bit.