Brand Architecture

Brand architecture is one of the least consistently understood practices in branding. Ask any two strategists what it means, and you’ll get three or four answers. In this article, I’m not trying to boil down or unify those thousand and one meanings, but rather present my own perspective. This perspective is shaped by my clients: when they have a problem, and they think something called Brand Architecture might be the solution, what could actually help them? (Spoiler alert: it’s not a family tree, and it doesn’t have the word “house” in its name).

At the highest level, a brand strategy answers: what do you want to be recognized for? Sometimes, the answer to this question will be simple and straightforward, but more often it will be big and complicated, even self-contradictory. If you solve many problems for many kinds of people in many arenas, each with their own wants and preferences, your desired brand starts looking less like a crisp, singular image, and more like a heap of pixels.

Brand architecture is the art of coloring and ordering those pixels—it’s a strategy for determining what kinds of brands you need, and how they should be related, so that you can build that image and edit it as the times change.

The brand architecture is not the image itself, just as a blueprint is not a building: it’s the plan you use to define the result you want, and the role of each piece in accomplishing that result.

Enough metaphors. Let’s get tactical.

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. I think about five different 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^[1]. 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. Coca-Cola Inc. offers a beverage called Coca-Cola. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, any sole proprietorship, like James Mueller, is indistinguishable from the service you get when you hire it to do brand architecture for you.

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. Some companies claim to want everything in their portfolio to work this way, an approach called a masterbrand strategy or branded house.

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 or extended into new arenas.

This approach can be attractive and efficient, but it’s not always the most effective. Better to describe the circumstances where a dependent brand is the right choice, and leave the door open for other approaches, like…

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.

Prime is also deployed across Amazon’s portfolio of brands, building bridges with otherwise-independent brands like Twitch and Whole Foods, where Amazon’s associations with digital retail aren’t relevant, but Prime’s associations with amplified service are.

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, or Mustang, which gives parent company Ford a dose of muscle. 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 true 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 is beneficial to 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 when trying to amplify fundamentally small distinctions (like Kellogg’s’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 that 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. Some companies try to always build this relationship, an approach that is variously called a house of brands or holding company.

Several great examples of independent brands come from the Amazon portfolio, with no relationship between the parent brand and subsidiaries like Goodreads (or, as mentioned before, Twitch or Whole Foods). Amazon is well-known for attempting to destroy the publishing industry and local bookstores, something that book-nerd users of Goodreads despise—so, when the former acquired the latter, they kept the existing brands in place.

As mentioned, this is also 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.

Defining your architecture

So, you’ve got a handle on the options available to you. How do you choose which to use?

The first step is breaking the common industry myth that you have to choose only one style, and apply it everywhere, across an entire layer (or every layer) of your portfolio. As I hope to have shown by my repeated use of Amazon as an example, you don’t have to lock yourself in — and if you think it’s possible that your company might take a range of approaches to R&D or M&A, or you just don’t know what those approaches will be, it’s better to leave your options open and think about all these possibilities. This is why, aside from the truly awful names, I recommend against such inflexible commitments as a house of brands or branded house approach. To me, the right question isn’t Which approach will I use every time? but When is each approach right for me?

With that myth dispelled, the next step is determining your brand strategy in the biggest possible way: what are all the things you want to stand for (qualities, audiences, offering types)? Only then can you start to assess the brands that you have today, how they stand for those things and what gaps do you need to fill.

These can be thorny questions to answer, but figuring out how to answer them, rather than finding an answer today and sticking to it for all time, is the key to effectively managing a portfolio of brands. And it’s far too deep a question to propose a one-size-fits-all framework in a free article.

At the end of the day, a brand architecture isn’t a table or a family tree, another pernicious myth in the space. Those common artifacts are just snapshots, not tools for making decisions, as anyone who’s ever tried to “use” one after the fact can attest. Instead, a brand architecture should be a useful tool, something more like a decision tree, describing likely (or unlikely) scenarios, which brands to use in which ways in each of them, when to create new brands and what kinds of brands to create.

With a brand architecture strategy in hand, the next logical step is a naming system: a strategy to use names as anchors for the brands in your ecosystem, to identify the kinds of names you want to use, where to use them, and how to come up with them.

Not sure whether your story needs one chapter, or five, or fifty? Interested in my standard list of architecture criteria? Want to try to convince me that the terms House of Brands and Branded House are good, actually?

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