Start your Business by Planning The Brand Architecture

When you think that the basic of brand building is about naming, then you’ve skipped a mountain. Prior to naming, the equally important bucket list is to have the future expansion plan of your brand in mind. Because when you started a business, there will always be temptation to open another business. It’s somewhat natural. But as a result, you will have to manage more than one brands, which commonly known as sub-brands. For that matter, prior to naming, i think that it will greatly help if you understand the concept of Brand Architecture first. It might can also help you with some name suggestion btw.

‘Brand Architecture’ refers to the relations between sub-brands within a company.

Master Brand Architecture. It is often referred as ‘monolithic brand strategy’ in which the brand of a company is displayed as a large entity. Additional brands are the subordinate to the primary brand, both in terms of name and packaging.

Sub-Brand Architecture. Often referred as ‘endorsed brand strategy’, it occurs when several independent brands are positioned under one umbrella brand, so that these sub-brands get endorsement from the main brand that has been established first. The sub-brands will still retain their own identity, and also achieving faster growth.

This relationship is usually created by adding the words ‘powered by’ or ‘a member of … group’, or following Apple’s way, where even though there is a standard in terms of naming (iPhone, iPod, iTunes), the user experience generated by each product is totally different.

Freestanding Brand Architecture. Often called an ‘individual brand strategy’, where a parent company has a portfolio that contains many co-existing brands that are independent in terms of name and visual identity. Usually the parent company name is not well-known by public and only attract the closest industry. For example, Procter & Gamble name might seems foreign, because you might be more familiar with their subordinate brands such as Pantene, Rejoice, or Head & Shoulders. This strategy is often found in the consumer goods sector where brands owned by one company usually seems to compete with each other. This strategy allows each brand to quickly adapt with the market changes, without impacting on other brands.

Hybrids. Often called the ‘blended house’ which occurs when the main company is regularly doing acquisition over acquisition, even though the sub-brands has been established as monoliths at the very beginning. We can use Google as the example. They originally had variations such as Google Mail, Google Books, Google Wallet, etc, but after a number of acquisitions, they maintain the characteristics of an acquired brand like YouTube, rather than renaming it to Google Video, or Blogger rather than Google Blogs. Some new invention also still comply with monolith standards, such as Google Play Store.

So, which one to pick?

Let‘s briefly review of what we’ve got so far. When we ignore hybrids / blended house, there are actually clear distinction between the other three Brand Architectures.

Monolith, a single main product produces extensions. The extension brand duplicates the visual and brand characteristics of the main product.

Endorsed, or different products located under a single umbrella, they’re connected with the main product through a similarity in terms of visual, name, and marketing strategies.

Freestanding, or products with separate identities. The products owns their distinctive names, personalities, audiences, and sometimes, even compete with one another. Since the beginning, the brand was designed separately from the main product so that the consumers of by-products might not even know the main product.

From this brief summary, we can pull off several consideration when selecting Brand Architecture:

1. Freedom of creativity. Freestanding gives you full creativity freedom: to create different brand strategy, name, logo, design, and marketing campaigns.
2. Load. The freedom in creativity comes with heavier work load. Freestanding has a greater burden because every brand needs to have a strategy, identity, marketing activities, legal aspects, maybe even a separate team. The time and budget needed to implement brand activities will be greater. Monolith is arguably the most efficient because brand marketing efforts can be focused on one single strategy.
3. Impact of success to the main product. Monolith strategy will simply increase the awareness of the main products. Endorsed strategy also creates associations, so that the relationship between the two products will be able to facilitate cross selling. Freestanding strategy won’t be directly impacted the main brand.
4. Crisis and risk. Freestanding is the most risk free, because the crisis experienced by sub brand won’t spread to the main product, due to the lack of association. As for the other architectures, damages will be difficult to control because the crisis of one sub brand can spread to main brands and other sub brands, because of the associations between them.
5. Targeting. Freestanding strategy can target different audiences because there are differences in name, logo, identity, vision, mission, position, personality to suit the niche. Therefore, Freestanding is suitable for targeting different audiences of the main products.

That’s all folks. Hope it helps.