What do women want? It's an age-old question, asked by fathers, boyfriends, husbands and, more famously, by the chauvinistic ad exec played by Mel Gibson in 2000's What Women Want. He solved the riddle by reading women's minds after a freak hair-dryer accident - a simple, albeit fantastical, solution to a classic advertising dilemma.

At around the same time, a newly launched media and entertainment company in Toronto was asking itself that very same question. In 2000, Corus Entertainment was still a small company recently spun off from its parent, Shaw Communications, but its vision was big: to become an international player in the broadcast media game. Finding out the answer to what makes women tick was one of the first goals the company gave itself, having decided that the women's speciality TV market held much promise for growth, as did radio consolidation.

It was in this decision that Corus' comprehensive approach to brand building was launched. They acquired the Women's Television Network (WTN) in 2001, and immediately set out to rebrand it into something fresh. It was not simply an exercise to find a new logo. The decision was to take a "rifle-like" approach to targeting the market, says Corus president and CEO John Cassaday, and it started with turning WTN into W.

The marketing department did focus group research to find out everything they could about what viewers liked and didn't like about the network. They wanted to relaunch with new content and a fresh new look and, not finding inspiration in the TV world, decided to look outside of it, says Susan Schaefer, VP marketing, television, Corus Entertainment.

"In creating W, we looked around the world for other women's networks, and we didn't really see anything that inspired us," she explains. "So that's where we looked to brands like Target. They took a brand that was dowdy, tired and almost K-Mart-like and they reinvented it to be fun and contemporary, but accessible. It became Targét. We thought if we could Targét WTN into W Network then we could really accomplish our goal."

What emerged out of the rebranding exercise was not only a sassy new women's brand precision-targeted at the 24-to-54 demographic, but a library of information about women and a strategy that would inform future rebrands and acquisitions.

The research done for the W launch evolved into the Her Report in 2004, and became a series of reports examining different aspects of women's lives and preferences. The Her findings have influenced everything from ad campaigns on the network to the creation of Cosmopolitan TV in 2008 and most recently Viva in 2009.

These three brands are designed to dovetail with one another demographically, and the advertising for each reflects that: W is for busy working moms and careerists who need a break from the everyday grind; Cosmo is for the sassier girl in the 18-to-49 demo, with an edgier attitude to entertainment; Viva is meant for the boomer woman, 35 to 64, a demo research indicated was going to be very attractive to advertisers as the decade winds to a close.