Brand architecture determines how different brands within a company support and enhance each other while maintaining their distinct market positions. By taking a hybrid approach, the company maintains a diverse portfolio of brands that includes luxury hotels, such as the Ritz-Carlton, alongside budget-friendly options, such as Residence Inn. According to Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report, companies that proactively manage their architecture outperform the S&P 500 by over 50% in terms of long-term share price growth.
The fact is to understand the options so you can make deliberate choices, not accidental ones. This is the playground of massive, multinational consumer goods corporations with bottomless pockets. Pick a model that aligns with your business goals, audience needs, and long-term scalability.
Many companies never bother to craft a brand strategy, instead allowing the market to brand them, for better or worse. Deep down, marketers know they should be putting more effort into branding, but many don’t know where to start. That said, brand architecture shouldn’t be a static framework — brand building is a continuous process that evolves. Your architecture should evolve with your brand as it grows to ensure it remains accurate and effective. Whether you realize it or not, all of these brands and products work together to help each other — and ultimately PepsiCo — succeed. Setting up a solid brand architecture is important for every brand — not just giant multi-brand corporations like PepsiCo.
In a House of Brands setting, new offerings can be safely added to a company’s portfolio while protecting the organization’s brand reputation. In a Hybrid Brand Architecture model, you get the best of both worlds, yet you also need to consider increasing costs and management time. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can choose between 3 brand architecture models, each with distinct benefits and disadvantages. A well-implemented brand architecture can bring many advantages to an organization. It can drive revenue, increase brand equity, capture customers, and create a concise corporate culture with a compelling brand story. Even though the company sells most of its cars under the parent brand name ‘Toyota’, it owns and operates supplementary automakers, including Lexus, Scion, Hino, Ranz, and Daihatsu.
When thinking about adding a new brand or product, it is crucial to understand where it will sit within your organization. In other words, you will have to define what type of brand architecture you will choose for your portfolio of brands. This article will highlight the need for brand architecture in brand management, explore the three main brand architecture models with practical examples, and outline the pros and cons of each one of them. Interior design services are integrated into the architectural design services and create a healthy and functional environment for its users through the development of space planning and product selection. Environmental branding adds value to the space by providing a thoughtful, purpose-driven identity that communicates a clear and consistent message. Building a strong brand identity is even easier when you use design templates to use similar designs across different media.
Even if you deliver similar product or service, you can still position yourself differently. Once you’ve found your 3 to 5 core values, then let’s put them into the main Strategy Worksheet — as you did with other outcomes. And here you can even check negative reviews on the internet to see what customers don’t like about your competitors. Define your brand values and create a culture and driving force for what to stand for in the world.
As your company grows, your brand architecture must change to include any new offerings or brands — whether it’s the result of a new product launch or an acquisition. Focused on eliminating the Obscurity Tax for mid-market professional services firms through surgical brand architecture and positioning. Brand architecture is the organisation, naming, and presentation of your products and services to customers. For example, Coca-Cola owns both Coca-Cola (branded house) and Minute Maid (house of brands). Google is a prime example—Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Ads—all carry the master brand.
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This strategy allows for the endorsed brands to innovate and be distinctive, without the added difficulty of marketing a completely unknown brand to customers. While combining other frameworks allows you to leverage twice as many benefits, it also comes with double the risk. Hybrid brand architectures are more complex and harder to maintain than either of the other architecture models because they often contain elements of both. For example, PepsiCo owns the Yum! house of brands and the Frito-Lay branded house. A branded house architecture combines several house brands under a single umbrella brand, leveraging the well-established master brand for its equity, awareness, and customer loyalty.
- But architecture is much more valuable when brands use it as the framework for their brand guidelines.
- And, of course, intangible costs like brand equity should always be considered as well.
- Here we want to Influence long-term business decisions to ensure that your brand is navigated towards the right direction.
- Yet another and perhaps similar example would be Unilever’s brand architecture.
This is a structure where the master brands has no linkage to any of the sub-brands whatsoever. Yet another great example of the Endorsed Brands approach would be the Kellogg’s brand architecture. In this model, new brands are being created that can operate independently and compete in different industries or categories. This is a structure where the master brand has some dominance over all sub-brands. Yet another great example of Branded House approach would be the Samsung’s brand architecture.
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Clients usually come to us, graphics designers, asking for a logo, brand identity or other brand design work. Let’s distinguish two scenarios of approaching a new branding project — with and without strategy. Therefore, the brand strategy sets out the plan for shaping those perceptions through different forms of expression both visual and verbal. However, before you start working on your brand strategy, let’s quickly define what brand strategy actually is.
Some house of brands examples choose not to broadcast the relationship between their parent brand and portfolio brands because of specific strategies around pricing, perceived quality, or target audiences. This is the main brand for your business and is likely the most recognizable of the brands for customers. It might be the original brand, or it might be from a parent company that took over a brand.
But running workshops and building a brand strategy will bring tremendous value to your clients and to your design practice as well. Here, we’re going to define your tone of voice to set guidelines for how you want to sound to your target audience. Ok, so once you’ve created your vision statement, now let’s define your core values and philosophies. You see, customers want the brands they do business with to have a strong core, so that they’re about something more than just selling them stuff.
With the right tools, you can make unique visuals and turn them into brand assets to be used across a range of platforms, materials, and marketing channels. You should put these elements in your style guide, so they’re used across all touch points, such as websites, social media profiles, and marketing materials. Capture your brand’s essence in just one sentence focused on this differentiation and what makes your brand stand out from the competition.
Low awareness in new markets, mixed or negative sentiment in specific segments, unclear positioning. In this case, attaching the parent name to a sub-brand may constrain the sub-brand’s ability to build its own equity. Your customers already move between your brands; a unified architecture reduces confusion and concentrates equity.
Generally accepted orthodoxy in architecture revolves around the above mentioned specific branded house or house of brands models and their sub-branded and endorsed variations. However, in our experience, while these models appear to provide a neat and aesthetically pleasing solution on paper, they rarely work for real world organisations. An endorsed brand is a sub-brand with its own distinct identity, name, and positioning, but it carries a visible endorsement from the parent brand to lend credibility and trust. Classic examples include Courtyard by Marriott (Marriott is the endorser), KitKat by Nestle, and Polo by Ralph Lauren. The endorsed model is typically used when sub-brands need positioning independence but benefit from the parent’s established credibility in a new market or audience segment. In a house of brands, new products must be treated as new brand launches, expensive and slow.
Conducting research is an essential step to developing brand architecture because it gives you the information you need to organize offerings in a way that makes sense for your company, customers, and industry. Ultimately, brand architecture is meant to bring order to a brand’s offerings and build brand equity. Not every architecture will work for every business, so let’s look at the options to see which may be the right fit for your brand. This occurs when your own sub-brands compete for the same customers and keywords. A clear architecture defines the specific “territory” for each brand, preventing you from spending marketing budget to fight yourself in the SERPs.
Just like every building needs a foundation, every business needs brand architecture. It’s the structure that allows you to organize your offerings, develop a brand identity, and gain brand equity. Whether you’re a startup building your first product line or a growing business managing multiple services, brand architecture ensures consistency, clarity, and strategic growth. A branded house structure is most common when a master brand has well defined product or service offerings that are tightly related to how the audience consumes the brand’s’ offerings. To be effective, brand architecture must reflect the needs of today’s complex organisations and dynamic markets.
Ultimately, it’s about developing a solid brand strategy and envisioning the company’s future growth in order to choose the right approach. The hybrid brand architecture is just a combination of different models under one organization. Over 90% of marketers utilize https://www.thedevondaily.co.uk/news/business/5-content-marketing-principles-trivenor-digital-oü-applies-build-brand-engagement social media for brand awareness, so using it to reach your target audience is essential. You can create content for specific platforms like Instagram or Twitter, use hashtags to increase engagement and visibility, or run targeted ads on social media, among many other useful tasks.
Along the way, make sure to consider your available resources (employees, budget, time). Certain approaches take more work than others, so you want to choose a brand architecture that fits your current capacity as well as your future vision. It highlights that brand architecture is a key “input” into a brand’s total value, emphasising that structure directly impacts financial stability. The Branded House model is the most innovative, efficient, and powerful choice for entrepreneurs and small businesses.