Fast Focus: Brand Architecture
How aligning on a few simple questions can lead to more effective outcomes.
“We need help with our brand architecture.”
This is a common request I have received many times throughout my career. Whether an organization is launching new products, acquiring new brands, changing their business strategy, have outgrown their current structure, or, honestly, have never developed an architecture in the first place, there are numerous reasons that can drive this need.
But what each client means by this request, or the reason they need one, is not always clear or consistent. It can differ by organization. By business unit. And even across project team members submitting the request. This can lead to inaccurate scoping (or re-scoping), the need for additional discussions or rounds of work, and ultimately a lot of project inefficiency and delays.
To help get clients ahead of these issues and ensure everyone is on the same page, and ultimately working towards the same goal, I always like to focus on a few initial questions:
What do you mean by “brand architecture”?
The most fundamental part of the request – and what shapes the final deliverable clients are expecting.
By definition, “Brand architecture refers to the organization and structure of a brand's portfolio of products, services, and sub-brands. It involves how a company chooses to organize and present its various offerings to the market, creating a clear and coherent relationship among them.” Or, another way I have commonly talked about it with clients is that it’s their external brand architecture or portfolio architecture. But this is not always what every client means.
While the majority are looking for help to better organize their portfolio for their customers, or are looking to organize their portfolio in a more traditional structure – branded house, house of brands, or hybrid – others are still a bit unclear about what exactly they mean or need. Some even have a more inside-out approach in mind and are really looking to better organize their portfolio to match their business units and reporting structure. This moves away from what a brand architecture is and should be. It becomes less about how their customers experience and use their brands, and instead focuses on how they view their brands.
To bridge the gap between these two mindsets, I like to focus the conversation around what the objective for the external brand architecture should be (particularly from a verbal or naming perspective) and what the objective should be:
What the objective of your external brand architecture should be:
To clearly represent your offerings to your customers and the marketplace
To thoughtfully organize your offerings to support your business and go-to-market strategy and cohesively tell your brand’s story
To make it easier to understand and connect your offerings across your portfolio – making it easier for customers to navigate and wayfind
To help optimize your brand(s) and build equity and assets in your most important offerings
What the objective of your external brand architecture shouldn’t be:
To communicate how your organization is structured internally
To focus only on how your brand(s) and offerings are visually connected
To provide a full detailed inventory or all of your portfolio’s offerings (e.g., solutions, products, services, features, etc.)
To identify and shift focus to your most recent prioritized solution or product areas
To qualify or set criteria for your marketing investment strategy
To provide the framework for an engineering or development roadmap
By focusing on the distinction between what it is and isn’t, it helps our agency and our clients align on what the final deliverable will look like and how they will be able to use it moving forward.
Who is this brand architecture meant for?
Next is less about what it is and more about who it is for. I touched on this a bit with the previous question, as we know brand architecture is meant to be how an organization presents their offerings to the market. And we also know that it is not an internal org chart. So, this would lead you to believe it is meant for customers or external audiences only. But that is not completely true.
While the primary audience is customers (and other external audiences) and helping them understand what your organization offers, how your offerings connect and how to navigate them, it should also benefit your internal teams in a similar way. Here are a few examples of how these internal teams should benefit from a clear brand architecture:
Sales teams: If customers are the priority, I would argue that sales teams are priority B. The reason is it should help your sales teams better understand what they are selling, the relationship between offering across the portfolio, and how to craft their story to customers. This can lead to more cross-sell opportunities, and the ability to potentially deepen relationships with customers and drive revenues.
Marketing teams: A better understanding of how brands and offerings relate can help your marketing teams develop clearer, more consistent messaging, and ultimately build brand equity where you want, how you want, and with the proper supporting stories.
Web and product UX development teams: A clearer understanding of how brands and offerings relate, and how customers are meant to understand and use offerings, can help development teams create simpler, self-evident navigation on websites, products, apps, etc.
What is the brand or portfolio story this architecture is meant to support and where should brand equity be built or extended to?
While we will be developing the structure and the relationship between brands and offerings with an architecture, it is key to understand the story (or stories) that structure is meant to ultimately support – and how your brand(s) will extend to the various levels of offerings in your portfolio. Will your company brand lead at every level and in every brand name? Or will other key brands lead the story at different levels? Where do these other brands come into play? At a solution (or solution area)? At a product level? Just for specific industries, verticals or audiences? Etc.
Understanding where brands begin to surface and play a bigger role in your story helps to provide us with a better relational understanding, and also leads into our final question.
Which brands are the “leads” vs. “supporting cast”?
Like any story it is important to understand who the “leads” are and who are the “supporting cast”. It is no different with your brand story. It would be near impossible – at a minimum extremely expensive and time intensive – to build strong brand equity into ALL your brands and offerings. Knowing that, it is important at the start to determine who are your “leads” and who are your “supporting cast” members.
“Leads” or your lead brands will do just that. They will lead your company story. They typically deliver the most value, most differentiation, most visibility, most usage, etc. Examples of these lead brands are:
Your Company Brand
Hero/Flagship Product (or Product Family) Brands
Commitments or strategic initiatives – your company’s highest priority areas of investment and impact
“Supporting cast” brands are the brands that will support, enhance, connect or prove out the lead story. Examples of these supporting brands are:
Other Product Brands (or names)
Service or Solution Brands (or names)
Feature, Technology, Capability or Ingredient Names
Support Names
Understanding these different roles and relationships enables you to focus your efforts and investments on the hero brands to build the most brand equity, and then leverage the supporting brands and offerings when and where you need them in your story for a more focused impact.
Answering these questions not only helps to deliver an effective brand architecture that provides more clarity to customers and internal teams (customer understanding, navigation, cross-sell), it also establishes a solid framework to inform and guide other valuable brand strategies and principles – e.g., naming, visual identity, brand acquisition and implementation, endorsed brand strategy, website UX, etc.
Have you recently defined (or refined) your organization’s brand architecture? Would these questions have helped at the start? Or is there anything we are missing? Please let us know as we love to hear from others, learn and continue to improve and evolve our own approach. For additional information on PS212’s approach to brand architecture, or if you are looking to embark on a brand architecture journey in the near future, please visit us here.