Brand System Architecture

Brand Architecture is the designing and management of the relationships between the Mother Brand, SubBrands, and the respective products and services.  Only companies with a single product or service need not consider product architecture. 

Most companies have several products or services that they must periodically review to make sure they are maximizing clarity in their product line, and leveraging the branding efforts of each product, and signaling a logical systematic approach to growth, as opposed to an ad hoc unfocused approach. 

An example of why companies need to consider their Brand Architecture?

Consider the fictitious ABC company.

The ABC company has a clear brand architecture to begin with.  They are the Widget company.  However, over time they improve on the product making Widget2™, and Widget3™.  Then they start making specialized versions of the Widget for sub-segments of the market: The Wow Widget™, and the Mini-Wow Widget™ for small customers, then the Super Wow Widget™ for big customers.  Then they develop a whole new class of products, the Whatzit™, and later develop improve on that with the Whatzit2™.  Now they are on fire and start to acquire new products and services and the Thingy™ becomes their hot new product line with a host of lucrative services that come along with the product. 

So at the end of all this the company that stood for the maker of the Widget, has a chaotic mess of products and services on their hands.  This is a common plight among successful companies.  They start of with a good brand architecture, but through growth or acquisition they inevitably develop a product portfolio that is chaotic.

Our approach takes a chaotic portfolio of products and/or services and using four brand architecture constructs (product roles, relationship structures, relationship spectrum, and name generation) illustrated by the four blue screens in the graphic above, develop a Brand Architecture that meets our demanding criteria for a good brand architecture. See sidebar.  Ultimately a good brand architecture will create a powerful mother brand and powerful product brands, that provide clarity to you and your customer.

Brand Architecture is the science of how a collection of brands in a portfolio fit together.  

A good brand architecture will provide clarity and leverage (or maximize) the power of the brands across the entire portfolio.   

This is not portfolio management, but rather a hierarchy to deal with a chaotic portfolio of brands.

We believe all successful companies that are growing and developing will need to occasionally look at their portfolio and make sure that they are not drifting into a chaotic architecture and if they are they need to push the brand portfolio through several screens (or constructs) that will allow them to redevelop an architecture that brings order back to the portfolio.  

 

• Provide a system to deal with current products

• Create clarity for the company and the customer
• Create synergistic associations between products
• Provide a method to deal with foreseeable products on the roadmap and strategic growth options
• Leverage brand assets (current awareness, credibility, or positive brand heritage elements)
• Leverage future brand resources (awareness building and strategic positioning)
• Create an economic advantage (either short-term via awareness leverage or long-term via brand maximization)
• Reinforce the mother brand (make it bigger/stronger), without diluting it (stretching it past the point of meaning)
• Maximize the stock value of the mother company (passing value back from product brand to mother brand)
• Implies a thoughtful approach to new product development, not an ad hoc strategy
• Reinforce a strategic position with customer and other constituents (analysts)
• Provide an appropriate identity for individual products to make them viable in the market
• Provide a practical/workable communication system