Brand architecture is a broad topic. It can be quite complex, and many people find it rather boring. But there is hardly any branding project that has not an element of brand architecture attached to it. Brand architecture is also very often highly emotional and there are also some common pitfalls.

So, what is brand architecture? When people say ‘brand’ they can mean many things. From a logo to a full brand experience including brand strategy, positioning, messaging, visual and verbal identity and brand activation. The same holds good for brand architecture. There are very different understandings of what brand architecture is.

Some see it as a brand portfolio strategy, i.e. deciding how many brands an organisation should have to go to market. This could involve brand rationalisation or brand creation as well as brand migration. Some see it as the relationship that an organisation’s brands have with each other. The typical branded house to house of brands models and their many variations everyone is familiar with, spring to mind.

Others see it as an information hierarchy on communication items or product packaging. I.e., defining the hierarchy of information beneath the brand level. This is very often driven by consumers’ purchase decision-making hierarchies.

At Design Bridge and Partners we define brand architecture as the framework an organisation uses to structure and communicate the relationship between its brands, products and services.

Examples of brand architecture models and frameworks:

Branded house model: A branded house strategy is a brand architecture approach where a single, strong parent brand extends its name and visual identity across all its products, services and sub-brands. Together, these products, services and sub-brands create a cohesive brand ecosystem that amplifies the parent brand’s goals and reinforces its market presence.

House of brands model: In this model, the parent brand maintains a low-profile connection to its subsidiaries, with each brand operating independently. From their operations to their branding strategies, these brands function autonomously. While collaborations or partnerships may occur occasionally, the brands within this structure generally have little to no influence on one another’s operations.

Hybrid brand mode: A hybrid brand architecture blends elements of both the branded house and house of brands models. In this framework, certain brands function independently, with no visible connection to the parent brand, while others are closely tied to and operate directly under the parent brand. This flexible approach allows organisations to leverage the strengths of both strategies, balancing autonomy with alignment to the parent brand’s identity.

The Value of Brand Architecture: Key Benefits Explained

When done well, brand architecture integrates brand positioning, value propositions and marketing activations to drive growth. It helps the customer to navigate an organisation’s portfolio of offerings, understand the scope of these offerings, identify ‘hero propositions’ and ultimately make the right purchasing choices.

On the flip side, brand architecture helps an organisation to realise a coherent and efficient portfolio of services, products and initiatives, to leverage economies of scale, save time and budgets by gaining the optimum coverage of market segments. And last but not least it helps to manage reputational risk.

Optimising an organisation’s architecture creates greater corporate value as it helps an organisation to accelerate the essential parts of its portfolio, building stronger connections with customers. Fundamentally, brand architecture is about striking the right balance between two conflicting objectives: Coherence and efficiency versus tailoring and limiting risk.

Having just one brand builds and leverages the reputation of this brand through coherence. When all activities of an organisation fall under one brand, brand awareness and reputation can be built fast. It also allows new activities to benefit from the already established brand reputation, minimising the costs associated with creating, building and protecting a new brand.

Finally, it supports cross- and up-selling. However, one brand also poses challenges: Reputational risks increase, and the navigation of an extensive portfolio of products and services is becoming much more complicated.

Contrary to this, a portfolio of brands allows fine-tuned tailoring, maximising marketing teams’ freedom to create specialist appeal to defined audience segments and/or specific offerings. Plus, it lowers the risk of damaging brand reputation if an activity doesn’t live up to its value or quality promises as only one brand in the portfolio will be affected. However, there are also downsides. Having too many brands is not very efficient as they fragment budgets and management time.

The core of brand architecture strategy is to find the right balance between these two extremes to support business strategy.

Brand Architecture Best Practices: Principles for Success

To be effective, brand architecture must reflect the needs of today’s complex organisations and dynamic markets. 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.

That’s why, instead of rigid, pure models, Design Bridge and Partners think of brand architecture in terms of a flexible hybrid model that gives organisations a clear structure, while also having the flexibility to navigate changing commercial priorities over time. This method allows organisations to decide each branded entity’s proximity to the parent brand, depending on the strategic objectives for that entity. Given the costs and management time that’s involved in creating, protecting and growing brands, strong brand architecture strategies use the parent brand wherever possible and use other brands whenever necessary. E.g., the brands within Disney’s ecosystem operate with different levels of proximity to the Walt Disney Company parent brand, depending on the experience they want to create.

From the audience needs, to potential product overlap, there are a series of questions we typically ask to evaluate each branded entity and determine the nature of the relationship it needs to have with the parent brand:

Typical questions are:

• Is the branded entity fully owned, led, and operated by the parent brand?
• Are there legal requirements for a separate brand entity?
• How aligned are the branded entity’s audiences’ needs to those of the parent brand?
• Are the competencies of the branded entity perceived to be outside those of the parent brand?
• Does the branded entity fully align with and support the parent brand’s purpose?
• Is the organisational culture of the branded entity integrated with the parent brand culture?
• Is there a reputational benefit to the parent brand from being associated with the branded entity, and vice versa?
• Is there a reputational risk associated with bringing the brands closer together?
• Do the products/services offered by the branded entity sit within the parent brand’s product/service ecosystem?

When to Review Your Brand Architecture: Key Triggers

The objective of a brand architecture review is to ensure alignment with business strategy, customer needs, and growth objectives. Typical triggers include:

• Mergers and Acquisitions: These often require restructuring and rationalising brand portfolios.
• Brand Proliferation and Internal Inefficiencies: Over time, brands can proliferate, leading to confusion and inefficiencies.
• New Market Entry: Expanding into new markets often necessitates a brand architecture review.
• Changing Customer Needs and Competitive Pressure: Customer preferences evolve, and competitors launch disruptive offerings.
• Brand Stagnation or Decline: Declining market share necessitates a review.
• Brand Refresh or Rebranding: A brand architecture review should always be part of these projects.

The Brand Architecture Development Process: A Step-by-Step Guide

At Design Bridge and Partners, our brand architecture development process is highly collaborative, and data based. To ensure our clients can get the absolute best out of us.

1. Kick-off: Every brand architecture project starts by agreeing on a clear set of shared objectives with our client. We get everyone on the same page as to what we are aiming to achieve, to make sure there are no unwanted surprises along the way. This includes creating a bespoke, dedicated senior agency team that ensures clarity and direction for the client and the project as well as setting up working group(s), a steering group and process for managing the wider group of stakeholders. This is particularly important for brand architecture projects as they are, as mentioned before, always highly emotional.
2. Research & analysis: Our teams immerse themselves in research to develop a strong and nuanced understanding of the client’s business, its strategy, the audiences’ needs, competitive landscape and the current brand architecture set up. Each project will employ a different set of research methods and level of depth. These may include qualitative and quantitative research methods, such as: depth interviews, focus groups, social listening, data analysis, brand architecture mapping and semiotic analysis.
3. Definition: This phase usually starts with the creation of brand architecture scenarios and the exploration of their pros, cons, cost and risk implications. Experience has taught us that early architecture hypotheses brought into stakeholder discussions help create quicker and stronger alignment across all stakeholders. Rigorous evaluation, analysis, and data support for the scenarios is essential. Regular senior executive engagement will also help to create the most effective solution.
4. Design: The new brand architecture strategy will in most cases require some adjustment to logos and/or visual identity. These can be minor or quite revolutionary depending on the shift from the current to the new brand architecture. Design solutions might also be required for migration steps, although at Design Bridge and Partners we prefer brand architecture migration that uses communications, i.e. messaging, rather than design solutions such as logo endorsements or merging of visual identities as these are very costly to implement. The design adjustments will be, in collaboration with the client, compared, contrasted and refined to reach the strongest end result.
5. Implementation: Guidelines, training materials as well as brand architecture migration plans and messaging will help to migrate to the new brand architecture strategy, across all touchpoints, as effectively as possible. This usually also includes decision-aiding tools for future products and acquisitions to ensure the new brand architecture is future proof.

There are some common pitfalls that can derail any brand architecture projects:

1. Not clearly defining what the project objective is Brand architecture can be very strategic or on the other extreme, very tactical, visual. It is vital to define clearly what the objectives and the deliverables of a brand architecture challenge are. As in most cases a wrong definition and/or moving goalposts will lead to trouble – disappointed decision-makers, frustrations amongst a project team and budget overruns. That means, it is important to establish clear, measurable success indicators from the outset that are tied to the business.

2. Underestimating the emotional component Brand architecture is highly emotional as it involves names and logos. And logos represent legacies, loyalties and power. It’s crucial to identify early on who makes the decisions, who are key influencers and what drives the decision-makers and influencers. It’s also important to remember that although brand architecture challenges are important, they are rarely the most important issue that senior decision-makers face. A project team might be spending days and weeks on developing architecture scenarios, becoming familiar with them, and then expect decision-makers to grasp complicated relationship charts in an instance. In contrast, best practice is to make brand architecture scenarios simpler, rather than more complicated. Going beyond words, visualising as much as possible to show what the scenarios would mean in practice is crucial. Whoever heard about a vision you can’t see? And don’t forget that it’s not only about logos and names but also about visual and verbal identity relationships.

3. Failing to remove subjectivity as much as possible There is very often no clear right or wrong brand architecture strategy. Brand architecture is about supporting business strategy. It’s about hard decision-making between options. The objective must be to remove subjectivity as much as possible - as hard as this is with such an emotional topic. I.e., underpinning all decision-making with research data and external validation is vital. There will never be enough data to support a scenario, but data helps to prevent battles of ‘beliefs’.

In summary, the most important part of a brand architecture project is bringing everyone along on the journey. Engage stakeholders from the start, so they feel ownership of the solution. Use a combination of rigour and engagement to ensure that stakeholders can buy into the decision-making on a rational and emotional level. Ensure that business heads and market leads feel heard and incorporated in the final decision, mitigating against ‘pet favourites’ and ‘sacred cows’. And remember, the best brand architecture scenario is not always the best solution: traction always beats theory.

Three brand architecture case studies

NTT is a powerful example of brand architecture consolidation. NTT, the $60Bn Dollar Japanese business group had acquired 28 different technology and cybersecurity businesses around the world but had yet to realise the holistic benefit of these acquisitions to compete with the ‘big boys’ such as Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Google in technology’s super league. NTT was not getting its fair share of selling large, bundled services to corporate clients because of its complex and fragmented brand architecture. In 2018 they decided to merge these 28 companies and 40,000 employees into a single $11Bn dollar business that covered everything outside of Japan.

Design Bridge and Partners collaborated with NTT on an extensive programme of work covering everything from brand positioning, brand architecture and migration strategy to an ambitious visual identity and messaging refresh, launch plan and communications to position NTT as a new global technology powerhouse. We re-organised their brand architecture strategy and go-to-market structure to make sense of their enlarged portfolio. This involved systematising the rigorous evaluation, analysis and synthesis of each of the 28 brands and their individual offerings to identify overlaps, opportunities, costs and risks. Early architecture scenarios brought into stakeholder discussions helped create quicker and stronger alignment across all stakeholders. We then defined a rigorous brand migration programme to transfer value to the new entity whilst mitigating the risks of such a large scale and culturally sensitive change. A refreshed brand identity created optimism and magnetism for the new parent brand with stakeholders.

At the end of year one, as the merged entity, NTT achieved Top Employers Institute certificates in 31 countries and was awarded the Top Employers Europe and Top Employers Global certification. In 2020, NTT was awarded Leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Network Services, Global.

HSBC is another example of a brand architecture strategy that focuses on the parent brand, albeit with great flexibility within a fixed framework. Over the years, HSBC had created a large number of sub-brands with a multitude of visual identities and siloed experiences to target different market segments and customer groups. However, these sub-brands had begun to fragment the parent brand. The result: HSBC were having the lowest cross-sell with customers of any major bank as the strong sub- brands created barriers against customers buying more from HSBC. In addition, this sub-brand strategy was increasingly costly to implement and difficult to manage, and it made HSBC slow to market new product launches.

The task given to Design Bridge and Partners was to help HSBC refocus on its parent brand to unlock growth for all business units and customers. We created a simplified portfolio around a single HSBC parent brand which involved retiring several large global sub brands. Business unit names and descriptors to aid signposting across the customer journey were developed and the overall brand identity refreshed to enhance the new consolidated parent brand and to create a clear signal change to the market. This was achieved through early alignment of the project with the business strategy and global CEO agenda. To engage everyone in co-creating solutions throughout the project, we used iterative sprints, working through scenarios with business units and local markets. Co-creating names, signposting and flexed visual identities helped persuade stakeholders to become more parent branded and retire their sub brands.

The refocus on the parent brand contributed to HSBC’s share price increase of 57% in three years since brand relaunch.

Brand architecture can play an equally important role on product level. Amcor is a global packaging company. It develops and produces flexible packaging, rigid containers, specialty cartons, closures and services for food, beverage, pharmaceutical, medical-device, home and personal-care, and other products. The growing pressure on packaging companies to lead with strong solutions on sustainability means that Amcor is expected to deliver market-leading sustainability solutions.

In this environment Amcor was predominantly seen as a plastics packaging company. Its vast portfolio of product brands, created through internal development and acquisitions over many years, was fragmented, difficult to navigate, and did not support innovation and sustainability messages.

Design Bridge and Partners developed, in collaboration with Amcor’s global and market teams, a solution that uses, reinforces and amplifies the Amcor parent brand, bringing greater focus and simplicity to the portfolio. We created a new Amcor-wide product architecture system that categorises current and future products into clear value propositions. This included the provision of a naming system for all products and a detailed design toolkit with guidance and materials to help all business units understand and implement the new system and packaging principles.

The new system clarifies Amcor’s competencies by making it easier to navigate its extensive portfolio. It makes a hero of Amcor’s industry-leading more sustainable product solutions, making it clearer to everyone that Amcor is a packaging solutions company, and not a plastics packaging company. The new product brand architecture was rolled out across the organisation for implementation in all customer touch points, including Amcor’s website and launched to customers in January 2022.

How to select the right agency partner for brand architecture

Selecting a brand agency partner for brand architecture is about finding a strategic partner who can help you achieve your strategic business and brand objectives. Look for agencies with a proven track record in brand architecture. As always, category expertise is a major plus. Here are some useful factors to consider:

• How well do they grasp your industry, your competitors, and in particular your business? Are they asking the right questions?
• Do they offer innovative and data-driven brand architecture strategies?
• Have they got methodologies, frameworks and tools to support brand architecture options with data? Have they successfully worked on similar brand architecture challenges before?
• Do they make things simple? Do they visualise brand architecture options, so people can ‘see’ what they would mean in practice?
• Do you feel comfortable with their team? Remember it’s people who make things work. Is there a good cultural fit? How senior is their team? Can they engage your key senior stakeholders and help to build consensus?

• How do they manage projects? Have they got sound processes? What's their communication style?

  In conclusion: Successful brand architecture

Remember three things and brand architecture projects should become easier.

Firstly, clarify what the real brand architecture challenge is to clearly define objectives and deliverables.

Secondly: It’s about decision-making and is highly emotional. Therefore, identify who the final decision-makers and key stakeholders are, keep it simple, visualise as much as possible, support with data wherever possible, and most importantly engage people as early as possible.

And thirdly, brand architecture is not about visual aesthetics and a neat brand architecture overview page in a strategy document. It’s about helping decision-makers to find the right balance between coherence/efficiency and tailoring/limiting risk.

At Design Bridge and Partners, we design brands that motivate and move. Compelling people to react and act, influencing decisions, and inspiring loyalty. Brand architecture strategy is a vital component in building brands that move people.

Get in touch at hello@designbridge.com to discover how we can help your brand.

Check out our other articles:

• Brand Refresh Strategy
• B2B Rebranding Strategy
• Building Brand Strategy