How to organize your brands for maximum impact and efficiency
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Brand architecture is the reason why some companies have to pour money into a gazillion brands and some companies just focus on one brand. In this post you will learn about brand architecture and how to decide on a strategy to house all your brands today and guide brand decisions into the future.
BONUS: A deep dive into Pharma and Medtech brand architecture considerations.
So why is it that when you buy sticky notes, you know, it's from 3M, but if you buy AXE, deodorant, you have no idea who manufactures it unless you dig deeper. That's brand architecture.
Why is brand architecture important? Every brand that you introduce might be fun, but it costs money. It takes a lot of resources. Time. It takes gut evidence. It takes a lot of management to keep it in place, to build the equity that you really wanna build. So let's avoid brand palooza. Please stop the madness, establish a brand architecture to help you today and use it as a frame work for your future growth And brand architecture is not just about the logo. It's not just about where you place the product logo, the company logo. That's a part of it. That's a tip of the spear. That's what people see. But outside of that are all the things that you would do to either place the brands closer together or place the brands further apart.
But first, let’s rebrand/ rename an architecture type!
There's a lot of nomenclature that describes brand architecture, but there's one that we should really strike from our language and dictionary. Master brand is now leader brand.
Brand architecture types
Branded house/ leader brand
Sub-brand
Endorsed brand
House of brands
1. Branded house/ leader brand
So the leader brand or branded house approach is where you have one key brand where all the brand equity really rolls into that one brand. So FedEx is a great example. We talked about Virgin. These are all great examples of master brands, where you're building equity in one brand. Everything that you introduce in terms of a product or a service is mainly a description of what that thing is. So like FedEx, ground FedEx office, for example, even BMW as they introduce new series of cars. Now, when we think about the next type, you start to get further further away where the products and services start getting detached and, and, and further away from that parent company brand.
2. Sub-brand
The sub-brand model is where you have a new name or even sometimes identity that sort of showed up side by side with the company brand. So Toyota Prius is a great example. Prius is a brand of its own, but when it was launched, it showed up side by side with Toyota that you kind of know, and have equity from Toyota into the Prius brand.
3. Endorsed brand
This is where a product or service is endorsed by a parent company brand or even sort of a brand that lend its equity to that brand. So Courtyard by Marriott is one. You also see examples where it's by something or from, or powered by. This is endorsed brand.
4. House of brands
This is where the product brands are really separated from the parent company brand. The company brand is invisible. So you don't really know who's behind it, like Dove, for example. That's very typical of the consumer packaged goods world and the pharmaceutical world.
I'll dive deeper into the healthcare realm later, but these are the four main types of brand architectures.
Deciding on a brand architecture
So how do you decide on a brand architecture? There's really no right or wrong answer. This is strategy. And so is about making decisions on one end of the spectrum. Is it a, a one ring that rules them all approach ala leader brand or branded house, or do you want to have a specific superpower for every superhero, that’s your house of brands approach. And so there's really no specific way you need to go about it. What is the most important is do you want to have a brand experience that stretches across all of your customer segments or do you want to have a very specific brand introduced for a niche and specific customer segment? And so it's really about synergies and efficiencies for me. When I think about companies introducing brands, especially at the outset, especially for startups, think brand at house, think one brand there's not enough resources to go around to all these different brands anyway, and you can always shift.
Brand architectures can shift
For example for Microsoft Windows. It was a leader brand model (or sub-brand model) for the longest time until Xbox came along, for example, where that's a totally different brand, that's very specific for a specific customer segment. That really is apart from the equity that Microsoft has gathered. But for Virgin, the same fun, entertaining hip, that same positioning is used across a multitude of different brands. It could be for the hyper loop. It could be for finance banking, that one brand stands for a specific thing, but across multiple customer segments. Could they have been successful introducing sub-brands? Perhaps, but it's so efficient to leverage the equity and the snowball effect of that one brand across all your products and offerings.
5 steps to establish a brand architecture
Audit your brands
Establish scenarios and options
Plan for brand transitions
Govern through style guides and decision trees
Measure and optimize
1. Audit all your brands
What are all the brands that's floating out there? What is happening to each of them? What's working? What's not? The first step is to understand the landscape of all the brands.
2. Establish scenarios and architecture options
Establish scenarios and hypotheses and start putting together the brand architecture frameworks, and really test and look at how they would act in different scenarios. Is it a scenario where you'll go into a totally different customer segment? Is it one where you might be introducing a brand within the same category in the next year? What are the scenarios? How does it play out? Get people comfortable with a specific architecture and a specific framework.
3. Put together a transition plan
This is where you put together a transition plan. Are you changing your architecture? Or do you need to transition brands? Is this the FedEx Kinkos example where you're acquiring a brand and you're transitioning it to a branded house? Establish that transition plan.
4. Put style guides and decision trees in place
Governance. It is absolutely important to create style guides, decision trees, anything that you can put in place, so people can follow and your brands don't run away. Remember, avoiding brand palooza is important.
5. Measure and optimize over time
Measure, get your feedback. Every brand is an evolution. It's not static. It's dynamic. So review what's happening to your brands. What's going well, what's not going well? And really have the lens towards your customers. Are you confusing them? Are they getting what they need? Are you helping them buy things together or pointing them to a direction or a brand that's really standing out for them? Make changes based on that.
Brand architecture in the healthcare industry
Let's dive deeper into healthcare, brand architecture in healthcare. It is already a very complicated industry, but what you typically see if we think about the pharmaceutical world, there's all house of brands and it's so ingrained into the nomenclature and culture that when you say the word brand in pharma, it's only products. They don't even think about their companies as brands, because a lot of times the company is invisible. So that's the house of brands architecture. What's also really interesting is that within the world of pharma, they are unbranded and branded programs. And when you say unbranded, these are usually disease awareness sort of programs, and it's actually sponsored by the company, but they call it unbranded. Whereas branded campaigns or branded programs, that's all about the product. So you see brand architecture has a very strong influence on how people operate within that realm. And again, within the pharmaceutical land, it is so ingrained that when you say brand, it's nothing to do with the company at all.
Changing the brand architecture in pharma
Could this change, should it change? Like any strategist, I would say it depends. It really depends on what is the strategy of the business. And the first thing is, do you want your brand to stand for something that can serve as a why across all the products that you put out. And that becomes a reason for why they consider your product. And the product brand itself perhaps could just help you understand when to use it. And so if you think about moving towards a branded house architecture or leader brand architecture, pharmaceutical companies can expect some benefits to that, which is the new drugs that you continue to launch can take some of that equity from the parent company, and you don't have to build it from scratch all over again. The other thing is the consistency of the experience. Today, if you have 10 different products, you have 10 different reps. And so you might have sales reps, each representing a product brand, knocking on the same door of the same physician or the same clinic. What if you are able to put it all into one bag where you have a company brand representative talk about the benefits of each of those products? And what about patients? When patients get access to a product, there are support systems, education. There are a lot of things that the patients can receive from the company. And today it's a mixed bag. It can come from the product brand, it can come from a support brand and it can come from the company brand. So moving towards a branded house model can simplify, but also reduce confusion.
Feasibility of introducing a new brand architecture in pharma
But is this actually possible? Can you actually do that? Well, legally, you can't have the company name as part of the drug, but it's nothing stopping a brand from showing the two brands together. So it's not a true leader brand, but is a step in the right direction. It's almost like a sub-brand model. And in healthcare that's already played out. You have companies like Medtronic and Abbott that's medical device, but Abbott also has a myriad of different products. And they spread across multiple customer segments, but they lean heavily into the leader brand model. Now, again, if you dig into the, the depths of what they do, they do introduce sub-brands, but really they have captured so much equity into that company brand. The sub-brands don't really mean much. They devices and the products are referred to mainly through the company brand. So the analog is already there for the pharmaceutical industry to take hold, but we shall see because change is hard. And if there's not a business imperative to change your brand architecture, it shouldn't be done. And it will probably fail.
Brand architecture in the Medtech industry
I've worked in medical devices for quite some time. And within that industry, I would say most of the time when new products are introduced, they have a sub-brand that goes along with it. Now, when I think about brand architecture and the way that these, these brands are put out there, for me, it doesn't make sense because of three things. The first thing is when medical device companies introduce brands, we all know that continued generations of those brands would come. So if you introduce a new name and brand a year and a half later, you're going to have a new product to introduce. And it's a phase in phase out strategy, meaning none of these products are going to last forever. They're going to be retired at some point. So there's not even enough runway for you to build brand equity into that. So why do it in the first place?
When I was working in these companies, the majority of it is driven from: Hey, we need something fresh, we need something exciting to talk about. And they put all of that into the name of that product. In fact, you probably don't need a new name. You can probably take the previous name or the name of that platform and introduce generations. Much like the iPhone does, and you can actually brand the algorithms. What’s really special about that device? The truth is if you have something special in that new product introduction, it is gonna be communicated, not through just the name, but it should be communicated through the actual benefits of the device. But if you keep introducing new names, you don't actually build equity into that platform, or you don't build equity into, you know, the type of algorithms or the smart technology that's in there.
So instead, I propose that Medtech companies brand their platform, ala iPhone. You still have Apple, which is your company brand, but just like the Apple iPhone introducing different generations. And if there's a specific technology that would carry throughout time, that you can continue to build equity on, make it a new brand, introduce an ingredient brand that you can put effort, resources, communications, marketing into it, so that it builds along the way.
Today what's happening is you have all these new brands and new names of products where people don't even get a chance to to recall or remember, because it's too short and they get phased out.
And that's my spiel on brand architecture. It is a passion of mine to avoid brand palooza and companies putting out brands for the sake of it. It is a specific strategy and it is imperative that you can make your decision, have a framework that helps you out to be the most efficient as you can.
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