How to develop brand architecture

What types of brand architecture are there?

Branded house
A branded house is where all the sub brands take the look and feel from the master brand. Your sub brands will usually use the same logo but will change an element like the colour palette and tagline. Apple is a really good example of a brand that follows the branded house approach.

House of brands
A house of brands is where an organisation’s brands feel very different to each other. This structure allows the sub-brands to stand alone as brands in their own right, which often means that each brand will have its own audience, identity and messaging. Unilever is a good example of a business that uses a house of brands structure.

Hybrid brand
A hybrid brand is a combination of both the house of brands and branded house structures. This allows the sub-brands to have similar styles as the master brand, while still retaining their own individual brand identities. Microsoft is one example of a business that uses the hybrid brand approach.

Steps to defining your brand architecture

When it comes to defining a brand architecture for your organisation, we’ve identified three steps for doing this.

Research

As with most things in a marketers world, research is really the place to start with developing a brand architecture with strong foundations. This will take shape firstly in the form of a brand audit – where you can assess things like your brand loyalty, brand awareness and perception of your brand. We’ve put together a complete guide on conducting a brand audit, which you can check out here.

The second part of the research stage will involve extensive market research. You’ll want to look at the current market and what your competitors are doing, as well as taking a deep dive into your customer personas – more on how to do that can be found here.

Strategy

Armed with all of your useful data from the research stage, it’s time to actually design your brand architecture. You’ll need to decide which brand architecture structure is best suited to you, and a good way to do this is to trial out a few of them and see which suits you best. If you’re updating an existing brand architecture, you may need to make some difficult decisions here on whether any sub-brands need canning if they don’t fit into your desired structure.

Application

Once you’ve decided on your chosen architecture, it’s time to share this across your organisation. This will involve unveiling it to all your internal teams, making it clear what the role is of each brand within the framework and what that means for your audience.

One important thing to bear in mind with brand architecture is that as your organisation changes or grows, your brand architecture must be revisited to reflect this – whether this is the result of the launch of a new sub-brand or a new brand acquisition.

If you’re looking to set your entire organisation up to make good branding decisions that have a positive long-term impact on brand equity, we would love to work with you. Get in touch with one of our branding experts today and we’ll be more than happy to help you get started.