Brand architecture - a road map for success

24 June 2008
Every business, to a greater or lesser extent, tries to build and strengthen its brands. But if brands develop without an underlying framework that connects them together then possible opportunities to drive value and create synergies for the business will be lost.

Brand architecture is a systematic way of organising the many different products, messages and features of your business.

Brand architecture will give your business the underlying structure to link your brands and subbrands together and allow them to support each other.  It will also provide your business with a framework to manage future opportunities so any new ventures you undertake and new brands you introduce can be made even stronger by association with the value and equity of your existing brands.

The aim of brand architecture is to create synergy, leverage and clarity within your business about the role of each brand.  Having a well thought out and implemented brand architecture will ultimately benefit your business.

Brand portfolio architecture will give structure to your portfolio and order to the scope, roles and interrelationships of each of your brands. You can identify individual brands as belonging in a particular place in your chosen brand architecture. This will help you assess the importance of your brands when making decisions about investing business resources to protect, develop and enforce those brands.

Developing a brand portfolio architecture is a complicated and a fact-specific exercise.

Developing and managing the brand architecture for your business involves deciding about:

  • adding or deleting brands or subbrands
  • how a brand or subbrand should be ranked
  • possibly extending a brand into a different product or service
  • building an alliance with another brand
  • defining or associating your brand with a new product or service
  • so much more!

Different but equally successful companies have used different internal brand relationships to achieve different outcomes.  The more complex the range of products and services offered by a business, the more complex the brand relationships have to be.

A simple example might be BMW.  The BMW house brand is used on all BMW vehicles but BMW also uses several other BMW “series” brands: 300 series (small), 500 series (medium), 700 series (large), M series (high-performance), Z series (roadsters) and X series (SUVs).

The BMW house brand is also used with the tagline, the “Ultimate Driving Machine” and the famous blue and white BMW logo.  Despite this range, the relationships in the BMW brand ‘family’ are clear and make sense.

BMW also owns other brands such as Rolls Royce and Mini, each with their own subbrands.  However the overall brand architecture of the organisation keeps those brands in different parts of their hierarchy, so as not to dilute them or confuse consumers.

In the Procter & Gamble business, each product brand acts as a standalone brand with little or no association with other products of the same company. Some of their brands are PANTENE, PRINGLE’S AND CLAIROL.

So how do you form coherent brand architecture for your business? 

There are several ways of going about this, but one suggested outline is to:

  • identify your relevant set of brands.  What brands do you currently use, and for what products? If those can’t easily be identified, then you probably have a brand architecture problem! If your products and their names are not clear to you, then they are not clear to your customers.
  • develop assessment criteria for each brand.  These could include the success of the brand so far, its reputation, the relative importance of the product line, how well the brand fits the other brands around it, and so on.
  • evaluate each brand based on the criteria that you have developed
  • rank and organise each brand after its been evaluated into a hierarchy and structure with the other brands
  • develop your new “ideal” brand portfolio framework
  • identify how your brands fit in the framework of your new architecture
  • use your brand architecture as a roadmap for developing any new brands. 

The practice is usually much more complicated than this basic theory and elements such as logos, taglines and colours used in various brands are also important.

But most important is having clarity in your brands.  If there is no clear relationship or reason for the branding that you adopt then everything about your brands will become random and inconsistent.

The advantage of brand architecture is simple.  Building on and around the equity of an existing, strong brand is much easier, and less expensive, than launching a new one.

An edited version of this article was published in Her magazine, July 2008

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