At KIND, we are laser-focused on maintaining our brand promise. I learned to obsess about the quality of our products and the consistency of our brand the hard way, through an earlier failure. Lack of brand discipline almost killed the Moshe & Ali’s food line that my first company, PeaceWorks, launched. The source of my failure was one of the most common and destructive mistakes fledgling entrepreneurs make: expansion at all costs and with no clear strategy.

Moshe & Ali started with a sundried tomato spread. In my quest to swiftly expand the line, we began adding new flavors of spreads, including basil pesto, garlic dill and green olive, topping out at sixteen varieties within a couple years. Even though we were only in a few hundred stores and generating sales under $1 million, I thought we’d grow revenues simply through increased offerings—no matter what they were! To remind me of my arrogance and betrayal of my consumers, I still keep in my office today a jar of our most bizarre entrant: a sweet-and-spicy Asian teriyaki pepper spread. This product bombed, and it should have been obvious to me that it would. This variety had nothing to do with our brand (previous spreads had been inspired by Mediterranean flavors), and it raised eyebrows among our loyal consumer base. Worst of all, the quality was far lower than the originals.

In my rush to grow our product line, I had lost sight of what my brand represented. At that point in my career, I did not understand the importance of keeping a brand’s promise. In my gut I knew these added products did not belong in our lineup, but I was unsophisticated and unfocused. I rationalized things by thinking, “What is the big deal if some people don’t like this variety? They just won’t buy that product again and will go back to the originals."

What I didn’t think about was that consumers had trusted the brand, and I had a responsibility to maintain that trust. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise that that misstep cost us loyal customers. Over the coming months we experienced a decline in sales. My lesson was to never again sacrifice quality to gain shelf space, never to take consumers for granted, and always to obsess about quality control. Anything we launched in the future had to be at least as good as the products we already had on the market.

This example and others like it have shown me that business is like the game of Risk. If you expand your armies too quickly and try to conquer land after land, you disperse your forces and leave your borders vulnerable. Enemies can then invade and defeat you. Your zeal to build an empire can lead to your demise. Similarly, when you’re launching new products, you first need to make sure you defend your original items—to establish your core and continue to win on that central offering. You want each new move to be strong. Otherwise, if you fail with new products, you’ll also dilute your assets and expose yourself in the areas where you had an opportunity to succeed. You’ll be deploying resources and attention that are needed to maintain and grow your market share in your core. You can expand eventually, but only once your flagship line is well cemented. Being passionate without a strategy won’t help your business.

A few years after KIND’s launch, a friend showed me compelling data that the fruit and nut bars I had created were tiny, as a category, compared to the slab bar (i.e., slabs of mashed-up, emulsified ingredients) segment, which at the time overwhelmingly dominated the space. He recommended we launch a range of slab bars. I considered it briefly, because we were still trying to decide the principles that would bind our product lines.

In evaluating this idea, I had to think about what KIND was going to stand for. Your brand gets defined by what you choose not to do as much as by what you choose to do. We could have gone in the direction of making a slab bar that contained fruit and nuts, and the common thread with our existing products would have been the use of fruits and nuts to make bars. The choice we made for our second line would be of extreme importance because consumers would connect the dots between the original and the new product line to infer the brand’s common denominator.

After struggling with the question, making a slab bar didn’t feel KIND to me, and we passed. It was a huge market and “opportunity” we were “giving up.” But KIND had been born out of the recognition that slab bars did not satisfy me and millions of other consumers. I wanted to be able to recognize the food I was putting into my mouth, to avoid processing our ingredients beyond recognition. I listened to my brand. And it told me, in my heart and in my gut, “That is not where you are meant to go.”

Analyzing data is an important tool in strategy - data can tell you how other products are performing. But it is also a dangerous tool. Data lacks heart and soul - you need to look inside for that. Data also doesn’t predict tomorrow. If you decide what products to launch based on data only, you will most likely miss the big-picture opportunities. To really lead, you need to combine the left brain with the right brain—the scientific analysis with the artful sense of how to create magic within your brand.

Regardless of where we end up with new product-line innovation, defending our core products was and will forever be a crucial part of KIND's strategy. That’s why we continue to invest in KIND Fruit & Nut bars even as we’ve expanded into other areas. We continue to innovate with new flavors, to ensure consistency and to obsess about quality. Failure to do so would risk losing all the customers we’ve worked so hard to attract.

This post has been adapted and excerpted from "Do the Kind Thing: Think Boundlessly, Work Purposefully, Live Passionately," by Daniel Lubetzky. Copyright (C) 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.