What Is Brand Architecture?: Types And Examples

Brand Architecture can be referred to as the strategic, relational, and logical structure for your business. In other words, the brand architecture of your business can be termed as a brand’s family tree’s entity.

There are two short terms that many organizations use for signifying Brand Architecture. These two terms are:

House of Brands
Branded house.

‘House of brands’ is a shorthand term used for Brand Architecture which implies that products of an organization and services bear a wide range of variety of brand names as opposed to that of the organization. On the other hand, “branded house” implies that almost all products and services of a company or an organization bear the name of the organization at its prime.

The key to the whole brand strategy is termed “brand architecture.” The brand architecture of your business sets the foundation for all the products, services, and all other components of your brand.

A strategic brand architecture also helps align the personality traits of your brand, your means, your promises, structural and visual requirements, and your story, in a particular unified structure.

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You Need To Know What Type Of Brand Architecture You Require:

So, the first step to developing a wise strategy to develop a great brand architecture is to know exactly what type of brand architecture you require. There are many different types of brand architecture, and you need to ensure that the one you choose best suits all the aspects of your business.

You will need to study all types of brand architecture and determine which resonates the best with your business, services, and products.

You must take care of the expenses and select a type of brand architecture that is economical and efficient.

Do Effective Research And Find All The Nooks And Corners About Brand Architecture:

Along with all the efforts that you are putting, you need to do effective research about the brand architecture. You need to test the audience you wish to reach out to. This is because it will help you to determine the best and the most effective messages and methods to move them toward your products.

You must remember that you can come up with the most successful brand architecture only by means of some effective and in-depth research.

The research will help you know about all the aspects of customer preferences, awareness, and experience. It also enables you to perceive when and why your customer is making decisions on what, as well as lets you differentiate between what your business is saying and what your customers are perceiving.

Utilize A Strong Master Brand And Use Its Name:

This type of brand architecture is known as monolithic brand architecture. In this particular brand architecture strategy, a business utilizes a strong master brand that is globally renowned and uses its name in different areas of its own business.

This gives authentication to your business, as it instigates your customers to believe in you.

It helps your business gain reliability and faith authentication. When you add a master brand’s name to any of your products or services, it gives your customers the opportunity to choose a line that they actually believe suits their tastes and personality traits.

For example, Google and Google maps are two completely different entities. But adding the name ‘google’ has given it more authentication and reliability.

Try Having A Powerful Parent Brand And Strong Autonomous Divisions:

This is another type of effective brand architecture in which a business bears an architecture having a strong and powerful parent brand and some strong autonomous divisions.

The endorsement of the mother brand provides different divisions of the business with credibility, which is why this type of brand architecture is called Endorsed brand architecture.

Having autonomous division help create faith in the minds of people and it defines the breadth and depth of your business.

As for an instance, Apple is one of the most pioneering brand in the world. Apple’s products are iPhone, iPad, iMovie, etc. these stand on their own. The credit goes to the power of apple and the positive association of customers with the brand.

Involve A Group Of Recognizable Brands Under A Particular Mother Brand:

This type of brand architecture is also known as Pluralistic Brand Architecture. In this type of brand, architecture is not as necessary to the public out there. However, the investors and the members of the interested business community consider it while looking into the brand.

The major of pluralistic brand architecture is that it consists of several remarkable brands under a single mother brand which is typically recognized by the customers and they are not really aware of it.

For example, most people are unaware of the Kimberley Clark brand. It is a global personal corporation that has been traded widely on the New York Stock exchange.

Use The Umbrella Brand Architecture:

This is a very common type of brand architecture and one of the most widely used ones. This technique of brand architecture involves changing the color of an icon which has been constantly used for the brand over a long period.

And after that, add some description to explain the purpose of the change of color.

The main aspect of umbrella brand architecture is the color. If choose this architecture, make sure you stick with a consistent palette of colors so that all the sub-brands work together visually despite the assorted colors.

For example, FedEx uses the same icon for its business throughout, changing the colors, and serving different clients having a different set of requirements across the world.

Try To Adopt The Hybrid Architecture Strategy:

It is another form of brand architecture that is quite commonly used by businesses. The hybrid brand architecture comprises some sort of combination of other types of brand architecture like monolithic, pluralistic, and endorsed brand architecture.

In this type, a particular brand is allowed to work on the areas of another brand where it is the best and in other areas, they operate individually in their own specialized verticals.

For example, in the case of Alphabet, Google operates in the space it has the most knowledge, such as searching and advertising while some of the smaller brands out there like sidewalk labs, Nest, calico, etc., operate individually in their own respective fields.

Know Your Customers Properly:

This is one of the most important things that you should remember when it comes to building a strong brand architecture. Make sure that you communicate with your clients in a proper manner and listing to them carefully.

Determine whether your primary audiences are global or local. Also, know what each of your audiences needs to hear to readily engage with your organization.

All these factors would help you structure all the business prospects, employees, business partners, financial community, regulators,s and the media.

You also need to ensure that your customers recognize, know and understand all the depth and breadth of your business and your company’s offerings so that they are more like to take their relationship with your business ahead and generate even more business.

For example, Amazon is a great company that has always known its customers from a close distance and has always managed to meet their needs and requirements.

Develop The Various Prospects Of Your Business Individually:

Do not forget to include media for your business, for they must need to have the correct perception of your business, products, and business to communicate with your audience in your favor more accurately and precisely.

Media is a great way to enhance communication between you and your customers. Also, you need to train your employees to make them even more productive and efficient.

Another important aspect of a business is the financial community of your business, and you need to make sure that it understands the value and scope of your company to provide it with the appropriate valuation and attention.

Apart from that, the business partners also need to grasp what the brand does so that they can bring in more added value and opportunities for your business.

Evaluate The Equity Of Your Business Precisely:

To develop strong brand architecture, you need to evaluate the equity in your existing subsidiary, corporate, and service or product brands. Brand architecture demonstrates the way your sub brands and corporate brand relate to each other and supports each other.

That is why before you determine whether the brand in the portfolio is going to benefit or cause any harm to the corporate brand, you must have a clear and straightforward idea of the perceived values of the brand in the lines of business that you are exploring.

You can consider FedEx as an example here. It evaluates all the equities of the businesses correctly and appropriately.

Assess The Worth Of The Cobranded Relationships:

It is important to carefully assess the co-branded relationships as it is beneficial to benefit your brand architecture. Co-branding offers exposure to your brand in a product class that would be quite hard to enter on its own. It can also provide additional brand equity to support a business.

You must consider very carefully whether two or more businesses should be partnered with each other in order to support a product, venture, or service, and whether they would be any profit by endorsing one or more brands.

Assessment is important because co-branding can also have long-term downsides, such as the audience getting confused with the brand message or creating conflicts that can cause massive damage to both brands.

Determine The Marketing Budget Carefully And Precisely:

Determining the marketing budget is important to determine what budget is available for your business. The brand architecture of some master brands is the most effective as they tend to develop a cost-efficient structure from a standpoint of marketing investment.

This is because each dollar spent on marketing accrues some benefits to all the brands.

One of the most expensive brand architectures is portfolio brand architecture. The reason behind it is that it requires to invest in each brand. That is why, while you develop a brand architecture for your business, you must know the resource requirements to support your brands.

For instance: Cocacola is a great example to be cited here that carefully assesses the marketing budget.

Understand The Tax Or Legal Implications:

Even though Brand Architecture is not the same as organizational architecture, certain structures might have some tax or legal implications.

Let’s have an example here, the use of a brand owned by another different company or a legal entity within the mother brand itself will generally need some intercompany license agreement.

Moreover, a group of businesses that want to use a brand might require to license, especially if using this internationally.

Develop A Proper Plan Timeline:

Lastly, one of the most important aspects of developing a strong business architecture is developing a proper and accurate plan timeline. Once you are done with the determination of the best brand architecture for your organization or company, it is necessary to develop a visual system to support it.

Suppose you are executing a structure of a master brand; it will be important for you to confirm some visual branding in order to pull all the aspects together.

The above-mentioned points are some key points to remember while developing a strong brand architecture for your business. You must remember that a power brand architecture help to manage the strategic aim of business more effectively to support various business objectives.

So, it is necessary to be aware of all the aspects of developing strong and powerful brand architecture for your company or organization.