Unpacking Brand Architecture
The Why, What and How of brand architecture related to products and services
This publication is broken up into three sections:
TL;DR - For those wanting a quick take
Summary - For those wanting a bit more context and high level points
Article - Main body of work containing full detailed article and explanations that you might want to consume over several readings
TL;DR
Brand architecture is a way of organizing the different subsections of a larger brand. Since brand architecture links back to products it is important to consider product taxonomies and marketecture’s.
Your organisation needs to use your product taxonomy to design a marketecture which will frame how you want to present your offers to the market.
A marketecture should align key stakeholders on how your products and/or services work together.
There are three archetypical brand architecture models: the branded house, the house of brands, and the endorsed brand.
Choosing the brand architecture approach that is right for your company requires you considering your organisational strategy amongst many other factors.
Remember that an organisation’s brand architecture organizes the entire product and service portfolio into sets that can be marketed and sold under brands that make sense to the end customer.
These brand portfolios ultimately need to link back to value pools delineated by Profit and Loss that need to be owned and managed by the executive leadership team.
Summary
Brand architecture is a way of organizing the different subsections of a larger brand. Since brand architecture links back to products it is important to consider product taxonomies and marketecture’s.
A product taxonomy is an important artefact, but your organisation needs to use the taxonomy to design a marketecture which will frame how you want to present your offers to the market.
A marketecture should align stakeholders on how products and/or services work together to orchestrate a solution to a problem or experience.
There are three archetypical brand architecture models: the branded house, the house of brands, and the endorsed brand. Each option comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Choosing the brand architecture approach that is right for your company involves considering your organisational strategy and factors such as your current brand architecture, your marketing goals, your current product and services mix, and any new products that will enter your portfolio, you also need to account for the experience of your customers.
Building a brand structure requires a few critical steps, however, each of them require analytical and critical thinking. Creativity is important but that comes after understanding the nature of the problem, its complexity and size of effort required to achieve your business goals
Remember that an organisation’s brand architecture organizes the entire product and service portfolio into sets that can be marketed and sold under brands that make sense to the end customer.
The shape and structure of your portfolio will be unique to your industry, the verticals you serve, competition, culture, and organizational history.
Your brand architecture should be adaptable and responsive to the realities of your business environment like Profit and Loss, etc.
Article
Context
Why should Product Developers (e.g., Product Design, Management, Engineering and Operations) think about Brand Architecture?
Product Developers that wish to be Product Leaders need to consider how the products they develop fit into a broader branded product architecture.
In this post, I’ll take you through the main types of brand architecture models, and how the structure of your brand can link strongly to the products and services you offer.
We’ll examine the benefits of solidifying a brand architecture and some considerations for when and how to do it.
So what is brand architecture?
Brand architecture is a way of organizing the different subsections of a larger brand.
Brand architecture shows us how the sub-brands of a larger whole are organized, and how they all relate to each other in ways that are meaningful to customers.
It can help a marketer see how to keep parts of a brand separate when needed, and how to allow them to work together in the marketplace.
This is once again another example of the strategic role a Marketing function can play in helping an organisation to deliver on its strategic initiatives.
“…A company’s brand architecture specifies which names, logos, messaging to apply to new and existing products.” written by Colin Finkle of Brand Marketing Blog
To show how brand architecture links back to products it is important to consider product taxonomies and marketecture’s.
Before we unpack what, a brand architecture is, it is important to cover some background. Below is a brief overview of content covered in more depth in this article.
Creating a Product Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types.
A product taxonomy as applied to product development refers to developing a hierarchical classification aimed at helping to define the problems or jobs to be done you solve with your products for end users and your customers in a systematic way.
A product taxonomy enables you to make sense of your end-user or customer landscape or eco-system in a structured way that enables you to align to product visions and strategies that are meaningful and pragmatic.
A good taxonomy can be used as a mechanism to get a feedback system going between product vision, strategy, and execution especially in the light of a dynamic system.
There are a couple of benefits to developing a product taxonomy. See this article for detail.
A few of the main benefit areas are listed below:
Marketecture creation
Consistent packaging and pricing framework
Shared language
Clarity in positioning and messaging
Integrated messaging across collateral and channels
Building a Marketecture
A product taxonomy is an important artefact, but your organisation needs to use the taxonomy to design a marketecture which will frame how you want to present your offers to the market.
A marketecture is a non-technical representation of solutions, products, systems, services and how they interact and relate to one another.
It is used to unify the various components of a Solution, Product, Service or Platform into a visual format.
A marketecture visualises what is core functionality vs add-on (flexible, and additive). When used well, a marketecture forms the structure for how your products are packaged, marketed, and sold, it also provides a vision for how your products could evolve.
Product teams can and should use marketecture’s to inform product strategy, and roadmap creation; with each major launch and release representing a new building block or incremental enhancement.
A marketecture should align stakeholders on how products and/or services work together to orchestrate a solution to a problem or experience.
Main beneficiaries from a marketecture?
Founders
Executive Committee
Product Management
Sales and Business Development
Product Marketing
Nuanced issues related to a marketecture:
Product Marketing is usually the custodian of owning the marketecture whereas Product Management would spend more time defining the product taxonomy.
Product Marketing is seen to be the key conduit connecting Product Management, Sales and Marketing Teams.
Product Marketing plays a dual role: “Voice of Product into Market” – inside out view and “Voice of Market into Product” - outside in view.
There is collaboration between Product Managers and Product Marketers in crafting differentiated positioning and messaging that is aligned to the overall product vision and strategy and ultimately business strategy and execution.
So now that we have this background, we are in a much better place to see how product taxonomies and marketectures connect to brand architecture.
Brand Architecture
The sorting of products into brands requires nuanced marketing thinking to decide the boundaries and relationships between brands. One of the tools, CEOs, CMOs, and brand managers use to structure their thinking is brand architecture.
There are three archetypical brand architecture models: the branded house, the house of brands, and the endorsed brand. Each option comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
The Branded House
In the branded house, a parent brand - usually the one with the financial muscle determines the overall brand direction. The sub-brands are subordinate to the parent brand, and they usually share a name with a qualifier to explain exactly what that sub-brand does.
FedEx is a prime example of the branded house brand architecture model, with their operating companies and portfolio of solutions all referencing the master brand. This structure enables consistent, cohesive, and coherent experiences, and builds equity for the corporate brand.
The House of Brands
The house of brands approach has a parent brand, but it’s not reflected in the sub-brands in an obvious way. Often the sub-brand is in the forefront with the parent brand in the background. This brand architecture model features in situations where a holding company buys up subsidiaries.
For most consumers, the parent brand is irrelevant compared to the individual products that it distributes.
A great example for the house of brands is Procter & Gamble, with dozens of product brands underneath the parent P&G brand. This structure makes sense for P&G due to the variety of products it markets and sells within the Fast-Moving Consumable Goods (FMCG) space, many of which have been marketed for decades under the product name.
Changing the name of a sub-brand like Oral-B to match the Procter & Gamble parent brand would only serve to confuse loyal consumers. An approach like this works for P&G because it seeks to address many different customer segments across a broad range of FMCG products.
The Endorsed Brand
An endorsed brand is a mix of the prior mentioned brand architecture models. The parent brand creates an umbrella over a host of other related brands that are viewed as children of the parent brand.
As in the house of brands example, related brands aren’t necessarily going to share a name with that parent like in the branded house. But in the endorsed brand model, the parent brand plays a much bigger role in the children’s lives than in the house of brands.
Meta formerly Facebook has employed this endorsed brand approach with its various assets and properties like Workplace, WhatsApp and Instagram which all feature the moniker ‘from Facebook’ and now ‘from Meta’ after the product name e.g., WhatsApp from Meta.
Hybrid Brand Approaches
As with most things in life the real world is not so neat and clearly delineated. The real world is messy for a variety of reasons. Very large organisations will take a hybrid approach to their brand architecture.
Most major brands employ something of a hybrid approach, where one of the “sub-brands” is also the parent. Think about Coca-Cola, Coke itself and Diet Coke (and Coke Zero, etc.) obviously share their name with The Coca-Cola Company but Sprite, Appletiser and Fanta do not, nor does Valpre bottled water in South Africa.
Marriott is an example of a hybrid brand structure where some brand extensions feature the parent’s name, while others do not. This format provides flexibility in naming and brand building. However, some consumers may be unaware of the connection between the master brand and companies that carry a different name (e.g., Marriott and Sheraton).
This is useful, if as a company you want to segment your customer base and appeal to different client segments and budgets. However, you will have issues if your positioning and messaging is not specific and targeted.
Additional Considerations
In recent years, many companies have been moving toward a strategy of emphasizing their corporate brand name over individual products. While the efficiency of this approach can be appealing, it doesn’t prioritize customer segmentation.
Al Ries and Jack Trout in their seminal book on positioning explicitly call this issue out as a potential failure mode of trying to rebrand products by adopting the corporate parent brand.
Choosing the brand architecture approach that is right for your company involves considering your organisational strategy and factors such as your current brand architecture, your marketing goals, your current product and services mix, and any new products that will enter your portfolio, you also need to account for the experience of your customers.
For example, your print marketing collateral might clearly describe your solutions, while your website might not align to the positioning and messaging from your offline collateral. Or your Sales team could be using unsanctioned material. We all know where that story ends.
Creating a brand architecture isn’t something to be taken lightly, as it can involve everything from developing a new business strategy, or better aligning to an existing strategy, to updating or repositioning a brand, to more tactical issues like revamping legacy websites.
However, the long-term benefits of building a consistent architecture are considerable. It is no surprise to see that some of the largest global companies also have significant brand values.
Benefits of a Coherent Brand Architecture
If a company has performed several acquisitions over the years, and these acquired companies don’t necessarily have the same brand personality as the parent organization. This can translate into any number of issues for customers.
For example, when a customer clicks on a specific solution on a company website, they might be taken to a different web domain that looks and feels quite different, they might even think the link is broken, or that they accidentally clicked on an ad. Or a prospect might bounce from your site because the information hierarchy isn’t intuitive.
Acquisitions can be a very sensitive and emotive issue. Often, the acquiring company goes out of its way to make the new company feel welcome.
While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in some cases the acquired company never gets integrated and ends up operating as a stand-alone unit with a separate brand that does not align to the acquiring organisation brand identity.
This is another reason for why M&A strategy needs to think about many factors beyond cost synergies but even needs to consider brand building and marketing when it comes to M&A integration planning and execution.
So, what are the benefits of a well-defined brand architecture and unified brand?
Clear market positioning and messaging in the marketplace - Clear and simple articulation of value creation and associated benefits derived from a Solution, Product/s, or Features. Instead of a hodge podge collection of products that look and sound different, you’re able to emphasize their connection through a consistent visual and verbal identity. The clarity in positioning and messaging can create credibility and confidence with boards of directors, VCs, and other stakeholders.
Grow revenue through increasing share and depth of wallets (i.e., upsell and cross-sell) - When you can tell your story, you’re able to express the value of your combined propositions and how they complement each other. That makes it easier to cross-sell across product lines or business units.
Create a strong marketplace narrative - Every organisation has a story to tell, but sometimes the compelling aspects of that story are hidden or not widely known. Creating a consolidated brand architecture gives you the opportunity to tell why you’ve built your company—what unites you (i.e., purpose), what unique capabilities you’ve developed (i.e., differentiating factors), and why you came together (i.e., why you are uniquely placed or skilled to do this). Telling your story the right way will require research, synthesis, a communications strategy, and creative execution.
Create shared understanding with various stakeholder groups - A shared narrative can serve as a rallying cry for all your investors, employees, partners, suppliers, and community members where they feel as though they are fighting for a shared cause. That’s why it’s important to create authentic buzz when doing a brand or product launch.
Without the right branding it can be difficult for a product to achieve product-market fit, drive sales and reinforce the meaning of a brand in a customer’s mind.
Also, if brands are not organized effectively and products are all-over the place then a brand loses meaning and suffers brand dilution.
Incorrectly branded products can cause confusion in the marketplace due to their confused positioning. Without a defined brand architecture, a business may sell a product or service they have no business being in.
Another clear case of how Strategy and Marketing need to work together. Brand architecture impacts the structure and design of product range architecture.
Below is a good example of how companies can lose their way especially if you have a range architecture with extensive overlaps, for example, General Motors.
Whereas Toyota have a consistent and internally coherent product range architecture. I am sure Alfred P. Sloan would not be happy with how the General Motors product range architecture evolved given the pricing overlap between brands.
Brand Architecture Foundations
The end game of brand architecture is to position the names, logos, and messaging that apply to new and existing products from your product taxonomy and marketecture.
Brands can be divided along the following dimensions like product type, vertical market served, customer base or other secondary factors like use cases. Your brand architecture will be some combination of the above factors.
The brands in your company portfolio need to be represented in the brand architecture: corporate architecture (i.e., Apple Corporate brand), brands (i.e., Apple device hardware, software or services), sub-brands (i.e., Mac, Watch, One, Music, News, TV+, Pay, Arcade), technology brands (i.e., Apple Retina Display) and unique product names (i.e., iphone).
The relationships between the various brands needs to be defined and mediated. For example Apple took a conscious decision to enable integration across all their devices and software eco-system.
For your brands, should a brand be a sub-brand of a parent brand or can a term applied to one brand apply to another? Should your products be integrated?
The simplest way to manage these complex relationships is with a visual diagram like a tree diagram. The tree diagram works well because it is MECE. MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. A key tool in the consulting toolbox.
The top of the tree will be the corporate brand node. Any brands will branch from the main corporate node. When we go from left to right, the diagram can be organised by vertical markets. If two or more brands are in the same or similar markets then they should be grouped as a category e.g., Lays or Doritos fall into the flavoured chip category.
Going from the top to the bottom of the tree should be parent-child relationships. Brands that are broadly defined are on the top and brands that are nested within other brands fall below.
For example Coca Cola would be the brand on top (i.e., Product Line) and Coca Cola Zero (i.e., Sub-Product Line Product) or Coca Cola Life (Sub-product Line Product) would be sub-brands.
A technology company example, is Microsoft as the organisational brand, Microsoft Office (i.e., Product Suite) as a brand and Microsoft Word (i.e., Sub-product of Microsoft Office Suite) as a sub-brand.
The top of the tree will be the corporate brand node. Any brands will branch from the main corporate node. When we go from left to right, the diagram can be organised by vertical markets.
If two or more brands are in the same or similar markets then they should be grouped as a category e.g., Lays or Doritos fall into the flavoured chip category. If you have a product taxonomy and marketecture, doing this work will almost seem trivial.
If you missed the article covering what is a product I suggest you read it otherwise what I just did with Coca Cola and Microsoft examples could be missed. The previous article covered ways to define what a product is and points to consider when positioning products and services.
The top to bottom hierarchy could show the following:
Company Brand -> Brands -> Sub-brands -> Products* -> Product Derivatives where Products* could be defined as:
Product Lines
Product Portfolios
Product Suites
Product Platforms
How you segment your offerings will be dependent on your context and market. A brand manager may need to break-up their product offers into multiple sub-brands if the differences need to be communicated and emphasised.
In some organisations Product Marketing Managers would own doing this work whereas in others Product Managers would be involved to some degree and in some places people with no product or marketing training or experience are expected to do this…
An additional consideration is that brand architecture could make sense to do on a regional or country basis. A brand architecture makes it easier to understand what products and services make sense to be offered under a specific brand.
Large organisations may have brands in some countries and not others. If you are a local country brand manager in a large organisation in a local country, it makes no sense to include foreign brands in your portfolio if they are not applicable to your market.
Components of Brand Architecture
Brand building has many components and there are various ways brands can relate. Certain types of brand configurations may make sense for a certain company, customer audience, purpose, or category.
Below are some options that brand managers can consider when building their brand architecture:
Master Brand/Branded House - a master brand (i.e., branded house) is represented on all products and services a company sells. Usually, the master brand is the name of the company. Examples: IBM, Oracle, FedEx
Umbrella Brand/House of Brands - an umbrella brand (i.e., house of brands) is used on many types of goods or services across product categories within a theme. One company can have multiple umbrella brands. Example: Tata, P&G, Unilever
Parent Brand - a parent brand is a branching off point for multiple sub-brands that sell different products, sometimes in various categories. Examples: Coca Cola, Cadbury, Mr. Clean, Chevrolet
Endorsing Brand - an endorsing brand is like a master brand or umbrella brand, but the company’s brand is secondary to the product’s brand. An endorsing brand’s logo is usually in the top right corner of a logo or packaging design. Examples: 3M, Christie, Nestle, Meta
Hybrid Brand - if an organisation has a large portfolio of products and services targeted at different customer segments and price points or has completed many mergers and acqusitions without fully integrating acquired companies then a hybrid brand structure might make sense for your organisation. Examples: Coca Cola Company Group
Divisions – organisational divisions could be based on one of the following dimensions like Market/Product, Industry, Function or Region or Country depending on the size and complexity of your organisation or jurisdiction that you work in
Categories – categories are informed by the product taxonomy you have created or by the market you are in. In the case of an FMCG there are well defined categories. The job of enterprising brand managers is to find ways to re-segment and essentially create micro-niches for an offer
Sub-Brand - a sub-brand adds to a parent brand’s name but differentiates it, so customers know to expect something different. Examples: Samsung Galaxy, Toyota Prius, Virgin Galactic
Product/s - products can be arranged in a variety of ways: Product Lines, Product Portfolios, Product Suites, and Product Platforms. For example, a product line is a set of products in a single product category under one brand or sub-brand. The products in the line differ in some way like taste, size, packaging format, etc. Examples: Mr. Clean Multi-Surface Cleaner, McDonald’s Happy Meal
Branded Technology – technologies like innovative materials, design or processes can be represented in multiple products and branded. Examples: 3M Thinsulate, Hyundai BlueDrive, Apple Retina Display
How Do You Create a Brand Architecture?
Creating and building brands isn’t something that can be done overnight. It takes sustained effort involving research, synthesis, strategy development and revision, and execution.
This can involve:
Customer/prospect interviews to tell you what they value and how they view the market and your company
Discovery sessions and internal interviews to discern what executives, subject matter experts, or other key stakeholders think you should be saying
A communications audit to determine how you’re currently communicating to the marketplace (i.e., if you are already trading and established) or the way potential competitors are communicating (i.e., if you are start-up)
Competitor research to understand the brand structure of your competitors and how they’re communicating
Creation of strategies for communications, as well as the internal and external brand launches
What practical steps can you take to define a brand architecture?
Building a brand structure requires a few critical steps, however, each of them require analytical and critical thinking. Creativity is important but that comes after understanding the nature of the problem, its complexity and size of effort required to achieve your business goals
Below is a proposed high-level step-by-step plan:
Assess your current situation (aka conduct a brand audit):
Start by assessing the current situation. You might discover that you need a simple brand structure, or that you’re already losing money because of confused positioning of the various product/service brands in your portfolio. Evaluation of your current brand structures and the creation of a new or amended structure is necessary so that can you ensure that your brand, products and sub-products or services don’t compete.
For businesses that have sales and marketing departments, you’ll often hear pleas for clarification on positioning or more product training. This might be the first sign that a proper brand structure is urgently needed.
Questions from customers on brand positioning could indicate that something is wrong with how the brand and products are perceived. If you start getting multiple questions of the same nature on social media or through other channels, it’s time to identify what exactly confuses your customers.
Select an appropriate Brand Architecture Model:
Some questions you can ask to guide your selection
What is your business strategy and how do the various products or services fit in to your strategy? Remember your product taxonomy and marketecture.
Is the nature of the new product or service so different that it can affect all other products or services in your portfolio negatively?
Does the current brand have a lot of history and a loyal customer base?
If you have multiple free-standing independent brands, is there a value in linking them together?
Are new products aimed at the same audience segment or are they at risk of cannibalizing each other or core brand sales?
The answers to these questions will help point you in the right direction to select the brand architecture model that will work best for your product and service offerings which are aligned to your business strategy.
Use your Product Taxonomy and Marketecture to inform Product Brand Structures:
List all your current solutions, products, services, and future offerings. Describe the benefits and features of each product and their target audience. Determine which jobs to be done are functional and which are emotional. Then review each feature individually and determine its relative importance.
Think about what brands you can group together based on the customer segment and similarities in the emotional and functional benefits that the products deliver. Also, consider how strong the positioning of each brand is.
Additional considerations if you need to add a New Brand to the portfolio:
Once you commit to your brand architecture choice you need to commit to it and have buy-in from senior organizational leaders. This is strategy in practice being manifested.
This means that every time you add a new product to your portfolio you need to evaluate where it fits strategically. Once again strategy, product development, marketing, sales, and distribution can’t be isolated when considered this way. It is all inextricably linked…
”#no #silos”
NB. The above meta process has a close analogue to the strategy formulation and execution planning process. The above is another example where Marketers and Strategists need to get more comfortable interacting and collaborating with each other.
Closing Remarks
Remember that an organisation’s brand architecture organizes the entire product and service portfolio into sets that can be marketed under brands that make sense to the end customer. The shape and structure of your portfolio will be unique to your industry, the verticals you serve, competition, culture, and organizational history. Your brand architecture should be adaptable and responsive to the realities of your business environment.
Postscript
Additional Key Considerations
Budgeting and Investment Allocations - A well-defined brand architecture should align to an organizational portfolio management structure and process and should be part of the conversations defining portfolio budget allocations.
Mergers and Acquisitions - Mergers and Acquisitions lead to a host of integration questions. Even before the merger occurs, you need to decide how the new brand fits into the brand architecture. The value that a brand brings to your portfolio will be the major decisive factor. There are a lot of reasons why companies merge. Sometimes, brand architecture structure is ignored in favour of future business benefit. If the current structure doesn’t work for the new brand, you might need to start from scratch and decide to develop a new structure. This could become a costly exercise if not addressed.
Brand Management Process - Managing the presence of product and sub product brands with a complex brand structure requires a rigorous management process. You need to make strategic decisions on how the brands are going to be resourced and managed online and offline.
Channel Strategy - Digital channel strategy, social media architecture and offline advertising and distribution, if used well contribute to the creation of a coherent, consistent and cohesive brand experience. When you manage all these aspects you create a brand experience hierarchy, that is largely informed by your brand architecture.
Digital Channel Strategy - Brand structure determines whether you have one website or multiple websites or apps or chat channels. Some Houses of Brands opt for one corporate website and several separate product brands websites. The way you structure your website will have a large impact on search results. The more brands you have the harder it is to organize websites and ensure each one of them ranks high in search.
Social Media Strategy - It’s essential to understand how to organize social media presence for different brands. House of Brands usually choose to have separate corporate social media accounts that feature general business news and announcements, while the product brands pages are more focused on promotional messages. In the House of Brands architecture, the parent brand isn’t emphasized so some companies choose to skip social media altogether. For example, Alphabet, Google’s parent brand, doesn’t have a social media presence.
Offline Advertising and Distribution - Advertising and distribution strategies are largely dependent on the current business strategy. For example, while Coca-Cola promote Coke and Bonaqua separately, they also run generalized branding campaigns where the focus is on the Master Brand.
Marketing Campaigns - The rationale behind Coca Cola’s strategy was the company’s focus on unifying all the emotional benefits into one overarching theme, defined as “happiness”. This approach has an added benefit since running a single company campaign is usually cheaper than the creation and production of multiple campaigns.
Resources
Alphabet the new surprising google brand architecture
House of Brands vs Branded House
How brand architecture can help your business
How to Develop your Brand Architecture
Importance of Brand Identity Design
Most Valuable Brands according to Forbes
Steps to Structure your Brand for Growth
Why brand Architecture Matters and what you can do about it?