Is Your Company's Brand Architecture Built on a Solid Foundation?

As your company evolves you may develop new products, find that your original product does not fare well in specific markets and re-brand it or acquire a product or company and need to merge or dissolve one of the names. In each case, you will need to decide how that new product will be named and do so in a way that does not affect the brand equity you've worked so hard to build.

Brand Architecture is the organizational structure companies use in the implementation products. It is a means for consumers, stockholders and employees to understand the relationship of each new product to the overall company (even though the parent company may not be closely associated with the product at all).

In a nutshell, brand architecture describes how your company's brands relate to one another.


The three types of brand architecture include:

Parent or umbrella (also known as monolithic) brands such as Nabisco, Proctor & Gamble or Apple - stand-alone brands with their own reputations and consumer loyalty. They can be used in conjunction with sub-brands or endorsed brands

Sub-brands or endorsed brands are "endorsed" by a parent brand but have their own identity. Consider Nabisco's products. Nabisco is prominently displayed on all of its cookie and cracker products giving assurances to the consumer that the product will be fresh yet the product names Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Triscuit, Snackwell, etc have their own distinct identities.

Individual product brands are stand-alone brands where the parent brand is given little to no prominence. Consider Unilever's Dove products as an example.

So, what does that all mean?

When creating new products, your company will need to decide the pros and cons of implementing any of the aforementioned brand architectures or your product -  regardless of quality - could suffer. Avoid such flops like Harley-Davidson's mistake of endorsing a wine cooler! There's nothing wrong with Harley Davidson opting to create or acquire a wine cooler; however had Harley Davidson re-evaluated its brand strategy and considered its core demographics, it would have perhaps opted to create the wine cooler as an individual product with its own unique name giving the Harley Davidson name no prominence (instead of slapping it right on the packaging).

What factors should a company consider when deciding which type of brand architecture to use?

In some cases, a company may decide its parent name should be used unilaterally regardless of the product - consider Virgin Airlines, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Trains, Virgin Megastore, etc. In most cases, Virgin acquires  companies and the Virgin name is added alerting consumers that this company will be as innovative and forward thinking as the products Virgin created from scratch. The downside of this approach is diluting the parent company brand name especially if all the new products are in the same market. Consider Special K which adds its name to cereals, protein bars, water and other food products.

As companies evolve and branch off into different markets, it may decide to use a sub-brand as in the case of Apple which later created the MacIntosh brand and later the i-series - iPhone, iTunes, iPad and iPod - in an effort to distance these products from the original computer technology yet still align them with the reputation of innovation. Each brand has its own unique personality yet consumers are always aware that the parent company, Apple/Mac, is the driving force behind the brand and the same brand insistence consumers have for Apple, Inc extends to the i-series yet at the same time, consumers concerned with any perceived complexities of using a Mac computer are still apt to by an i-series product because as a separate brand it is free to build its own identity as "easy to use".

The downside to creating sub-brands is the cost of using company resources to cultivate and market a new product. Each sub-brand needs its own team that a smaller company may not be able to afford.

Individual brands like Unilver's Dove may be a good fit for a company creating a product outside of what it creates for its core demographic. Consider Harley Davidson's white wine coolers. Forget that the Wall Streeter next door owns a Harley and think only of the brand image of the company - blue collar, rough, rugged and rebellious - not a target audience for white wine coolers! Beer maybe but definitely not a white wine cooler. The downside to creating an individual, stand-alone brand, however, is that without the parent brand reputation, your marketing division is forced to create a brand identity from scratch, unable to use the brand equity you've built up over time. In some cases, it's worth it if the brand equity could be negatively affected by the new product's brand image not aligning with the parent brand.