Brand architecture crash course
What is brand architecture? Well, it's a strategy defining the intended relationships between brands in your portfolio. You probably knew that, though, and your real question is, what kinds of relationships could my brands have?
There's an industry standard answer to that question, but it's going to be wrong upwards of 99% of the time. Don't worry, though: there's another, much more intuitive and practical system, one we can teach you quickly.
First, let's look at that system. Then, we’ll take a look at the industry standard, and why it doesn’t work. And lastly, we’ll look at some of the important questions you should be asking yourself as you build your own architecture.
Part one:
Brand Relationships
When thinking about what kinds of brand you need and how they’re related, it helps to have an idea of the possible relationships brands can have. We identify five types of relationship, each with its own role and use case.
1: The Synonymous Brand
The closest possible relationship between two brands is… that they’re the same brand. These synonymous brands represent offerings that are indistinguishable from the company that offers them: same name, same logo, same everything. This is most common with companies that only have one product, or grew from such a company and never renamed their flagship product.
A great example of this is the relationship between Amazon the company, and Amazon the retail website. There’s no distinction in how these offerings are presented to the world: same name, logo, colors, attitude, ideas. Google has a million offerings, and the most important one, the one at google.com, is just called Google. Twitter Inc offers Twitter.com, Netflix Inc offers Netflix.com, and so forth.
2: The Dependent Brand
The next-closest relationship two brands can have is one where the subordinate brand represents a subset of the parent brand, describing a specific capability or offering within the parent’s portfolio. Rather than trying to build new associations or an independent identity, the subordinate brand is just telling you what part of the parent you’re engaging with. This is usually achieved with an intuitive name, locked up with the parent, that tells you the type of offering or category the subordinate brand represents, and either no logo or one that adds a word or two to the parent brand’s mark.
A great example of a dependent relationship is Amazon’s relationship with Amazon Basics, their store brand of cheap household goods. Amazon is already associated with being a place where you can get anything for cheap: Basics just closes the gap, meaning the cheap things aren’t just bought from Amazon, but made by them.
This is an extremely common approach for product brands, like the Apple Watch, and category or solution brands, like GE Aviation. This works best when the parent brand has an extremely strong reputation that needs to be put to use, rather a middling or weak brand that needs to be shored up.
3: The Extension Brand
Sometimes, a single powerful brand just can’t do all the work you need it to, which is when extension brands, sometimes called sub-brands, enter the picture. While the parent brand builds associations that are useful across the entire portfolio, an extension brand targets new equities that are, for one reason or another, beyond the parent’s reach, or not right for every single offering in the entire portfolio. Their name still starts with the parent company’s name, but they may take a more evocative approach with the name of the extension, and evolve or reinterpret the parent brand’s visual system.
A prime example of an extension is the relationship between Amazon and Amazon Prime. The Prime brand functions as a sort of intensifier, representing subscription services and premium upgrades across Amazon’s brands. Obviously, Amazon itself can’t mean “Amazon, but better,” so they created a new brand to mean that. As Amazon introduced digital media offerings, such as music and video streaming, they were introduced as dependents of the Prime brand, because they fit its subscription-related equities.
Extension brands usually support many offerings, either as a product family like Microsoft Office or Nike Jordan, or as an ingredient brand like Apple’s Retina displays. They may also be a hero product, like YouTube, whose very existence amplifies the power of the parent brand. This is a common endpoint for acquired brands, where they’re brought firmly into the parent brand’s fold, but retain some of the unique equities that made them worth acquiring in the first place.
4: The Endorsed Brand
Speaking of acquired brands, the first step many acquisitions take is an endorsement, the lightest possible relationship between two brands. In an endorsed relationship, the subordinate brand has some explicit reference to the parent brand in its name or logo, but it leads with its own unique equities, and has its own independent verbal and visual systems.
One brand that’s fond of endorsements is Amazon, with brands like Pill Pack, their mail-order pharmacy. Amazon is associated with retail and delivery, which benefits Pill Pack, but far more important was building Amazon’s credibility in the pharma space, somewhere they hadn’t played much before. So, they decided to keep Pill Pack’s branding (and the equities that came with it), and slapped on an endorsement line so Amazon could start to siphon off those equities for itself.
Companies often take this tack with acquisitions, where the parent wants to gain a halo from the acquired brand, without scaring off the acquired brand’s customers. More generally, this is the right approach if the subordinate brand has very little to gain from the parent brand’s presence or association with the rest of the portfolio, but the parent brand stands to gain a lot from association with the subordinate, like a reversal of the dependent brand relationship.
Companies with large, self-competing portfolios use this approach when branding similar products for incompatible audiences (like Unilever’s use of Axe and Dove, or Kelloggs’s use of Froot Loops and Special K).
5: The Independent Brand
Sometimes, a company happens to own brands that have nothing to do with each other, or who are trying to do opposite things. In these instances, companies build independent brands, ones that don’t share any commonality in name, logo, or identity systems.
Several great examples of independent brands come from the Amazon portfolio, with no relationship between the parent brand and subsidiaries like Whole Foods, Twitch, or Goodreads). Amazon is well-known for delivery, but not necessarily quality, freshness, or ethical dealing, all of which are extremely important to the Whole Foods customer base. So, Amazon didn’t try to incorporate the parent brand into its acquisition, as it would have only done harm to their thriving business.
This is a common approach among holding companies with diverse portfolios, like Alphabet’s relationship to Google, X, Waymo, and Calico. It’s also used with portfolios of similar offerings with radically different equities, like General Motors’ relationship with Chevrolet and Cadillac. It’s also the de facto starting point for acquisitions, especially if the subordinate brand was acquired to diversify the parent rather than complement its offerings.
Combining approaches
The strength of this approach to brand relationships is that it allows brands to grow, change, and adapt to new circumstances. By building a flexible network of brands, companies can squeeze every ounce of value out of the associations they’re building, while minimizing friction between brands that really shouldn’t be working together.
For an example, let’s look at a few of the brands we’ve talked about here: Amazon, Prime, and Whole Foods.
As we just saw, the Whole Foods brand is completely distinct from the Amazon brand, and with good reason. But just because the Amazon brand itself wasn’t right for Whole Foods didn’t mean their portfolio had nothing to offer, and that there was no way to build a bridge from Whole Foods back to Amazon. The bridge they used was Prime, which was associated, not with low-quality goods, but rather with same-day delivery and membership deals. These equities were useful to Whole Foods, and by introducing Prime Member Deals to Whole Foods, Amazon was able to establish a sort of beachhead, building a very light connection that could benefit both brands.
Arguably, Prime Member Deals is a dependent of both Prime and Whole Foods, inheriting a name and color from one and a holding shape and retail context from the other. This kind of sophisticated decision is a lot easier to make when you have a clear idea of the tools at your disposal.
Approaches in action
Armed with an understanding of the five general kinds of relationships you can build, the question is: when do I use each of these relationships, and why? This is where the rubber hits the road, and an article about the framework can’t help you quite as much. It’s also where brand architecture goes from being a philosophical exercise to an actual tool.
For us, that tool looks like a flow chart. Each node asks you a question about the thing you’re naming: what kind of thing is it, what associations does it need to thrive, what associations does it need to avoid. The endpoints define different relationships with your current existing brands:
should it be synonymous with your primary brand,
or an extension of it,
or totally independent of it?
What about other important brands in your portfolio?
To build that tool, you need to ask those same questions about every brand in your portfolio.
What does it stand for, and what must it stand against?
How many useful associations does it have today?
How many inhibiting ones?
What does it need to build, what existing brands can support it, and what associations could only be credibly built by entirely new brands?
An exercise like that is hard work, involving a lot of soul-searching and carefully-crafted research and analysis. But that work has to be done, one way or another: better to do it upfront, with buy-in and a strategic approach, than to try to cross each bridge as you come to it. And far better than trying to lock yourself into an unrealistically simple approach that will shatter when you need it most.
Which brings us to…
Part two:
The Branded House
of Brands
The industry-standard, which you'll see pretty much every time someone talks about this topic, is what we call the Branded House of Brands. This framework proposes a binary spectrum of portfolio strategies: on one end is the Branded House, and on the other is the House of Brands — neither of which is at all related to the brand strategist's basic tool, the Brand House. These folks love a (single) metaphor.
For the sake of clarity, we're going to call the Branded House approach a 'mono-brand strategy,' and the House of Brands approach a 'holding company strategy'. Armed with those much clearer names, you probably don't need an explanation of the two approaches, but here it is anyway:
In the mono-brand strategy, a company's portfolio rests entirely within a single brand. One company to which this strategy is often attributed is Apple, whose watch, TV, arcade, and card offerings are all generically named, and whose phone, tablet, and computer sub-brands are very tightly tied to the parent's equity. MacBook and Apple are almost indistinguishable, compared to, say, Thinkpad and Lenovo.
Meanwhile, in the holding company strategy, it's the opposite: every element of the portfolio is independently branded, with almost no relationships between them. This is attributed to holding companies like Alphabet, but the most commonly-shown example is P&G, surrounded by a constellation of home goods brands.
And, well, that's it. Sure, sometimes two other approaches are defined - an endorsement system, like General Mills’ relationship to Cheerios, or a sub-brand system, like Ford's relationships with F-150.
Are these diagrams tools? Can they be used to solve challenges, and give guidance in unforeseen circumstances? Or are they just close-up snapshots of one corner of the problem?
We think these are less like an architectural schematic, and more like a screenshot of a Google Maps satellite photo of a building that’s already built.
Diagnosis: oversimplification
The problem with this approach is that it is too simple.
Let’s take the real-world architecture example a little further. Let’s say you need a new space—a new home, new apartment, new workspace, what have you. You work with a broker who markets herself as simple, and claims he can make the decision extremely easy.
He wants to show you just two potential spaces. Each is perfectly square. The first is a multi-level warren, tight twisting hallways leading to tiny rooms crammed full of built-in cabinets and closets, with almost no free floor or wall space, but an incredible amount of storage. The second space is just as large, but is an utterly empty, echoing cube, with vast high ceilings and no partitions at all.
When you tell your broker that neither of these spaces works for you, he nods his head sagely and says, “Ah! An architectural connoisseur. You’re looking for a hybrid approach.” You ask him how to figure out how many rooms you need, and where, and for what, and he just looks at you with a blank smile. “Hybrid approach.”
This is exactly the problem with the branded house of brands framework. Sometimes you want a big capacious flexible room (say, for living or dining, or having a big meeting) and sometimes you want a bunch of cabinets and drawers (say, for cooking, or storing office supplies). The question is never going to be “Which of these approaches do I want 100% of the time,” but rather, “When do I want to take each of these approaches?”
To bring this firmly back to branding, let’s return to the Apple portfolio. Yes, they have many dependent brands, but that’s not their entire portfolio. Apple also has Beats by Dre, which is barely even an endorsed brand, and with the advent of Apple TV+, they now have dozens of series brands which have almost nothing in common with the company that produces them.
The existence of these endorsed brands isn’t evidence that Apple has strayed from their strategy, or that they’re doing something wrong. It’s absolutely right that Beats by Dre, an acquired company with an irreplaceable association with a legendary rapper, should retain its own existing brand. And it’s equally right that Apple TV+ exclusive shows should have their own brands: imagine trying to browse between shows that are all represented with black-and-white Helvetica and glossy tech close-ups. Pinecone and Pony could never authentically live under the Apple brand, but that doesn’t mean that the company shouldn’t make the show.
With P&G, the question is a little more esoteric. Certainly there are no P&G-brand products that you can buy, and so they are undeniably about as close to the holding company strategy as you can get—at the company level, they maintain exclusively independent brands. But, as we explored with Amazon Inc. and Amazon.com at the top of this article, there are many sides to P&G. They speak to customers (with the best advertising campaign of all time), but they speak differently to workers they want to hire and retain, and differently again to investors who they want to influence on matters of governance, or raising equity. Those brands share a name and identity, but they represent very different things to very different people.
The existence of the Pinecone & Pony brand, or the P&G employer brand, are not examples of exceptions to a strict and simple rule: they are evidence of exactly the kind of smart decisions a brand architecture should support you in making yourself.
Part three:
Test drive these ideas
Now, you came here — or at least, having come, you made it this far — because you want to know how to use these tools for yourself. Let us give you a fun example, one we’ve used before as a hiring exercise with brand strategist applicants, to give it a shot.
Imagine for a moment that you work as a brand manager at FritoLay, the PepsiCo subsidiary snack brand. You’ve just been assigned to an exciting, high-stakes new project: the mad scientists down in R&D have developed a new product that you’re being asked to brand. The product is a new kind of corn tortilla chip, which, like a child’s breakfast cereal, will have fifteen healthful vitamins and minerals mixed into its flavorings.
The question you have to answer is this: should this product be a new brand entirely, or should it have some relationship (what kind?) to an existing brand in the FritoLay portfolio?
You ask two different brand consultants for advice, and these are the hero images of their pitch decks:
“FritoLay is a house of brands.”
“FritoLay operates independent brands distinguished by their key ingredients.”
Do both of these tools tells you something you didn’t already know? Which seems like it’s going to be more useful in making this decision, and convincing your stakeholders that your decision is right? What other questions do you think might precede or follow the snippet of flowchart on the right?
And how would you brand these new vitamin-fortified chips?
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Have questions? Have ideas?
Want to argue that the branded house of brands is good, actually?