A clear brand architecture strategy provides a simpler framework for marketers, a clearer story for sales teams, and greater relevance for customers. We call this brand coherence.
Organizations with more than one product, service or brand need to ensure clarity of brand roles, differences, and relationships.
We help companies determine how many brands they need in their brand portfolios, what the roles of each of those brands should be, and how those brands should relate to each other.
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Brand Architecture Definition
We define Brand Architecture as the degree of relationship between your organizational brand and your various product and service brands. This strategy may be expressed in a variety of ways, yet it should always connect meaningfully to the company’s identity. The main questions become: “What promise is this offering delivering?” and then “How does this offering deliver our promise?”
By resolving these and other questions, we turn brand architecture strategy from a purely conceptual exercise into a real, meaningful set of organizing principles and clear decisions. The resulting strategies work not only in the present, but they help organizations maintain brand coherence n their portfolios as they grow and prosper.
Types and Models of Brand Architecture
Most companies think about brand architecture in terms of two models: “branded house” and “house of brands.” Each of these come from a more traditional way of looking at brand relationships as static and regimented. Either the corporate brand dominates, or the product brands dominate. More modern approaches to brand architecture are more organic and show that there’s plenty of middle ground between these two models. Many leading brands today include a mix of “branded house” and “house of brands” approaches, each designed to grow their diverse customers, employees and investors into a strong community with an even stronger affinity for their corporate and product brands. No model is necessarily better than another–the right architecture depends on your trajectory and goals. What is most important is to clearly understand and articulate those goals, so you can then design your brand architecture to best meet them.
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Brand Architecture Benefits
There are many benefits to thoughtful, strategic brand architecture. First, it helps build awareness and appeal at the right levels within an organization and maximizes the value of each brand. Second, it focuses on efforts and resources in the right places, so you realize the positive impact from all the time, energy and money you spend on the brand. Finally, it creates a clear framework for future decisions. No successful organization is going to always have the exact same number of products, services, and divisions. It will grow, shrink, sell off or acquire businesses. A clear strategy will help you adapt to each change, grow strategically, and build brand value. When your employees, customers, and investors all understand what promises you are making, and how you are delivering on those promises, they come to you with the right expectations, and your relationship with them grows.
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Our Case Studies
We’ve resolved brand architecture challenges for clients of all kinds, including multinational diversified corporations, technology startups, research universities, and non-profits. In most cases, our challenge is to resolve complexity that has set in over time. Sometimes we are asked to evaluate the implications of a new acquisition or business strategy on existing brand architecture. In others, we develop a brand new strategic framework where none previously existed. In all cases, our approach to brand architecture assignments is straightforward and rigorous.
- We work with our clients to understand their business and goals, and to hear them express the brand architecture challenges they face.
- We inventory all existing brands and brand expressions to understand the challenges and identify opportunities for creating coherence.
- We present alternative strategies for solving the brand architecture challenge, supporting each strategy with rationale and schematic diagrams.
- We develop guidelines for governing the chosen strategy, complete with decision tools for retaining coherence as the organization grows and evolves.
