When it comes to building and scaling a robust brand, clarity isn’t just the first step—it’s a crucial component that evolves alongside your business. Initially, this clarity focuses on precise positioning and messaging. However, as your brand expands and diversifies, maintaining a clear structure becomes critical. This is where my expertise in brand architecture comes into play.
What Is Brand Architecture?
Brand architecture is the strategic framework I use to organize and structure your brand’s portfolio. This framework is essential when your company introduces new products, ventures into services, or integrates other companies, perhaps following a merger or acquisition. Effective brand architecture not only maintains each sub-brand’s unique identity but also enhances the overall equity of your parent brand.
Why Invest in Brand Architecture?
In today’s competitive market, ensuring a coherent brand identity across multiple product lines and services can be challenging. Brand architecture allows you to manage perceptions and experiences seamlessly, making sure that consumers receive a consistent and clear message. This consistency is vital—it enhances customer understanding and loyalty, and it can significantly boost your sales.
Here’s how I will guide you through developing a robust brand architecture:
Initial Audit and Documentation: We’ll start by mapping out your current brand architecture, detailing the hierarchy and relationships among all brands within your portfolio. This step is crucial for understanding how to leverage brand equity across sub-brands effectively.
Strategic Questioning: Together, we’ll tackle strategic questions that will help refine how your brands are perceived both internally and externally. This process is crucial for aligning your business offerings with market expectations and ensuring they resonate well with your target audiences.
Dynamic Brand Strategy Development: Brand architecture is not a one-time setup; it’s a dynamic part of your business that should evolve with market changes and internal growth. I will help you revisit and adapt your strategy regularly to accommodate new brands or phase out the outdated ones, keeping your brand fresh and relevant.
Guideline Development: I will develop clear brand guidelines that cover all communication and design elements. These guidelines are essential for maintaining consistency across your visual identity, tone of voice, and core messaging.
Internal Communication: It’s essential that your brand architecture is understood across your organization. I will help communicate these structures clearly, ensuring that everyone from your marketing team to customer service understands how the various brands relate to each other and the parent company.
The Benefits of Structured Brand Architecture
With a well-defined brand architecture, you can introduce new products or services in a way that builds upon established brand equity rather than starting from scratch each time. This not only saves time and resources but also reinforces your parent brand’s market position.
Additionally, a structured brand architecture allows for targeted marketing. By defining distinct brand personalities that appeal to specific consumer segments, your marketing efforts become more efficient and impactful.
Investing in a sophisticated brand architecture is more than just an organizational exercise—it’s a strategy for growth. By clarifying how all elements of your company’s portfolio interrelate, you can streamline your marketing efforts, strengthen brand equity, and position your business for long-term success.
Brand architecture tends to fall into one of four specific structures, which are:
- A branded house structure is most common when a master brand has well defined product or service offerings that are tightly related to how the audience consumes the brand’s’ offerings. The structure of the brand names and identity design of the sub-brands are usually a derivative of the master brand making its messaging and appearance feel and sound distinctly familiar.
Branded house examples include household names such as:
AppleFedExVirginCoca-ColaGoogle - House Of Brands: In this model, the master brand — which operates primarily from an organizational and investment point of view — houses a suite of distinctly different brands all operating independently of one another. Master brands operating under such structures often have a well-diversified target audience across multiple industries, while remaining relatively unknown to consumers. The main benefit of this structure is in the independence and flexibility the sub-brands enjoy under the parent brand.
House of brand examples include:
P&GUnileverGeneral Motors - Endorsed Brands: In this setup, you have a sub-brand like Dove that is endorsed by the master brand, Unilever, with a reference to that brand throughout their communication. This allows the sub-brands more flexibility than the branded house structure in terms of its positioning, appearance and messaging while still leveraging the benefit of the master brand’s equity through the endorsement. Essentially, the sub-brand establishes itself in its own world while consistently and publicly holding the hand of its master brand.
Endorsed brand examples include:
Nestle KitkatSony PlaystationPolo by Ralph Lauren - The Hybrid Brands structure is an emerging trend set by modern brands, which is all about subtlety. Google (a brand owned by Alphabet) is the best example of a hybrid with its sub-brands. Each of these sub-brands uses the Google colour palette and/or clean graphic style and without over referencing the master brand, still very much “feels like” a Google brand.ChromeAd SenseAnalyticsHangoutsMaps
Ready to refine your brand’s architecture? Contact me today, and let’s craft a strategy that propels your brand forward.
Connect with me for more information or schedule a consultation to begin your journey towards structured brand growth.
