What is brand architecture?

Brand architecture is part organisation and part military strategy, in other words brand architecture is about optimising the hierarchy, linkages, and roles of brands within the portfolio in support of the business strategy.

Products, business units, specific services, marketing programs, features, lines extensions, apps, web sites, etc all need names. How these names relate is the difference between brand coherence and brand confusion.

Why is brand architecture important?

There are several benefits of a clear architecture, for one thing it helps organisations structure their brands and products to drive value and growth by enhancing:

Clarity: Clarifies what the organisation can do for customers by providing a coherent face to the offering and the business strategy.
Efficiency: Increases marketing efficiency by ensuring brand leverage without overstitching.
Focus: Provides direction for where to focus innovation and marketing investments by distinguishing strategic brands from others in the portfolio.
Growth: Opens up new opportunities for growth by lending credibility form existing, successful brands.
Equity: Enables equity to flow through the portfolio by defining the relationship between portfolio brands.

What are the various roles brands play, how are they determined and why are they useful?

The optimal architecture usually does not line up neatly with internal organisational structures – and that’s okay! Brand Architecture takes an outside-in view.

Brands can be divided into categories for linking products and target groups more closely together.

Each brand asset needs a clear role in the portfolio. I like to use these terms:

Corporate brand: The company name and legal entity. Often used as endorser but may not be customer facing it all.
Master Brand: Drives purchase decision and defines user experience. Most strongly represents the differentiation inherent in the offer.
Endorser Brand: Provides approval, credibility or guarantee to a range of products, but is usually not the driver.
Ingredient Brand: Features, materials, components or parts that are contained within other branded products. Not an equity driver, often an equity energiser.

Architecture defines brand roles.

So, what’s included in architecture? Only offerings are included in the architecture. Trademarked or licensed branded elements live outside the architecture and enhance equity by providing uniqueness and memorability.

In other words: celebrities lend meaning, characters create likability and sponsorships build affinity. BUT these are all branded elements which are not included in the brand architecture!

What is the range of brand architecture solutions, what are their implications and what determines which is the best option? There is a broad spectrum of brand architecture solutions. We often say that a brand is either part of a House of Brands or a Branded House or it’s a Hybrid.

House of Brands: Builds strong individual brands for category dominance, this limits risk by containing brand reputation (good for high risk industries) This architecture focuses of the branding of multiple sub-brands while the primary brand gets little or no attention. Proctor & Gamble is a perfect example. Under P&G there are dozens of brands, including Pampers, Duracell and Gillette just to name a few. However, P&G gets very little prominence of itself, and adds no real credibility to any of it’s products.
Branded House: The company is the brand. All products and services within that company will be subsets of the primary brand. A good example of a branded house is Apple. They use a singular name across all of their activities. To all of their stakeholders they are know simply as “Apple”. They may have different categories/divisions (iPod, Mac, iTunes, iPhone, etc…) but they all have to fall under the scrutiny of existing branding strategies and standards.
House blend or Hybrid: This is an architecture based on the development of sub brands with the added credibility of the the existing parent brand. Google, for example, started as a search engine then continued to establish the primary brand through offerings such as Gmail, Calendar, and Maps. Eventually, they began to acquire other, smaller tech companies such as Blogger and YouTube. These acquisitions maintained their existing brands but gained credibility through the primary brand of Google.

Hybrid solutions include variants of House of Brands and Branded House

Which is the best option you may ask? Most solutions are a Hybrid. Architecture decisions have investment implications, and the optimal solution is determined in large part by the business strategy. A brand within a House of Brands targets multiple segments, address individual geographies and have few synergies to be leveraged. In comparison to a brand within a Branded House, which targets single or few segments, reinforce a global organisation mindset and have many synergies to be leveraged.

How do marketers go about developing architecture solutions for their brands? And how do companies go about this in real life?

Not all brands are equally important. Brand Architecture helps guide decisions about innovation and investment as portfolio brands compete for resources.

We usually distinguish between a Strategic Brand, a Cash Cow and Stand-Alone Brands: Amazon is a great example here. Amazon keeps its strategic businesses separate through stand-alone brands, and uses an endorsed approach for its other brands.

Cash cow: Amazon.com
Strategic brand: AmazonKindle or Amazon.com Prime
Independent brand: IMDb

When is it important to think about brand architecture?

It’s time to revisit brand architecture when an organisation changes strategic direction or adds important new capabilities.

These points indicate that it is time to consider brand architecture:

In the event of important acquisitions or mergers.
If companies have many brands and offers that compete for budget and position.
Corporate brand and product brands have the same name and are hard to distinguish.
The brands are no longer as relevant to the target group.
The brand's significance has spread thinly and has lost credibility and strength.
Programmes, elements, features or sponsorships are asking to be treated as brands.

Read how you can develop your brand identity for the future.

How can Mission help?

Audit your brand to identify gaps and opportunities.
Generate ideas for closing gaps.
Evaluate your brand architecture and recommend ways to increase clarity, efficiency and equity.
Develop an exciting and winning brand identity that is adapted to the target group and in line with the brand's purpose .
Set up a design system for your business.