Brand architecture is essential for companies looking to manage growth. Suppose a company is acquiring brands or expanding offerings. In that case, brand architecture provides the framework for these new entities to fit into the more extensive portfolio without introducing confusion or internal competition. This structure helps customers quickly parse products, offerings, and divisions. Research into customer perception is vital to ensure a successful brand architecture strategy.
Define Your Master Brand
As a business grows, it’s easy for the once cohesive brand to become a jumble of products, services, and sub-brands. Brand architecture is the best way to clarify your offerings and ensure customers can find what they want. One of the biggest challenges when creating a brand architecture framework is deciding how closely you want your brands to associate with each other. It’s essential if you’ve recently undergone a merger or acquisition (mainly if it was with a former competitor).
The exemplary brand architecture can help you answer questions like, “To what extent should we cross-reference our various brands and promote them together?” It also helps ensure that everyone in your organization understands the strategic role of each brand in the overall brand architecture model.
Identify Your Core Values
Brand architecture is about managing the depth and breadth of your business’s offerings. It involves defining organizing principles and creating links between your different brands. It also helps you leverage your brand equity, experience, and reputation across all your sub-brands and products. Determining your core values is a deeply personal exercise. You may share specific values with others, but at the end of the day, it’s all about what matters most to you.
Make a list of your core principles to begin with. Then, select 4-5 of them that resonate the most with you. Once you’ve identified your core values, please take a moment to think about how you live them in your daily life. It will show you how well they align with your brand architecture.
Define Your Sub-Brands
Brand architecture can assist in organizing and enhancing the visibility of your company’s various offerings, whether in terms of goods or services. A robust brand architecture framework can also provide a roadmap for product development and marketing campaigns and give businesses flexibility for future growth opportunities. For example, if you have a flagship product, you can use sub-brands to explore new markets and serve other audience segments, such as business customers or those in different geographic areas. Similarly, a personal brand can have sub-brands that speak to diverse audiences.
Utilizing the branded house architecture model, some businesses enable their sub-brands to capitalize on their parent brand’s name recognition and awareness. However, this can lead to negative spillover and confusion if the master brand has a weak public perception.
Create a Brand Identity
A rebranding effort may seem intimidating, but it’s something every business needs to do. As companies grow, they acquire or launch new products and services. These offerings can sometimes become a jumble of brands, sub-brands, and sub-sub-brands that make it difficult for the company to cross-promote or communicate with its audience. Choosing the proper brand architecture framework can solve these issues. A well-defined brand architecture creates clarity from chaos and sharpens your ongoing branding efforts. In addition, it allows you to measure and manage your brand equity. It helps ensure that the overall brand performance meets or exceeds your expectations. Your brand architecture type should also be flexible enough for growth and change. It includes upcoming mergers, acquisitions, and pending product launches.
Organize Your Offerings
Brand architecture is crucial to assisting customers in understanding the relationships between your various offerings, especially if you have a variety of goods and services targeted at different demographics. It also provides a compass for your company to guide its trajectory and make room for future growth, should the need arise. Some companies use a house of brand architecture. Others endorse their products or services with their master brand name. This approach may provide greater flexibility, but building brand awareness for approved brands can take more work. The best approach is to balance the two models for the most compelling framework.
