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Brand Strategy
From Confusion to Cohesion: Why Brand Architecture Can Benefit Your Business
If your brand is complicated, confusing, or just plain chaotic, brand architecture might be the solution.
It happens. Sometimes as a business grows—acquiring other companies, launching new products, or expanding into new markets—the cohesive brand it started with becomes a jumble of brands, sub-brands, and sub-sub-brands.
Brand architecture is the best way to bring your business’s offerings back into focus. It can help you better cross-promote products and services—and regain control over how your brand is perceived by customers.
In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about brand architecture, including why it matters for your business, how to know if your brand needs an architectural overhaul, and the 4 types of brand architecture (including some famous brand architecture examples).
We’ll even walk you through a step-by-step guide to choosing and defining a crystal-clear brand architecture framework for your own business.
What is Brand Architecture?
Brand architecture is the organizational hierarchy of a company’s brands, sub-brands, products, and/or services. It’s an integrated system of names, symbols, colors, and visual vocabulary that bring clarity to a brand portfolio.
The best brand architecture is intuitive. It maps directly to how customers think about a business and the various ways it solves their problems.
Intuitive brand architecture makes it easy for customers to understand the relationships between a brand’s various products and/or services, including how each offering meets their unique needs.
Brand architecture can also influence purchasing behavior by facilitating the transfer of brand equity from one brand to another.
If a customer already trusts a parent brand, for example, they are much more likely to purchase one of its sub-brands.
Let’s take a closer look at the role brand architecture plays in brand awareness and business success.
Why Brand Architecture Matters to Your Business
Like most things branding, brand architecture is ultimately a tool for shaping perceptions. It allows you to define both the breadth and depth of your brand portfolio.
But the practical benefits of brand architecture don’t end there. A common misconception is that brand architecture is only for large, complex organizations. But even small companies can see measurable improvements in business performance by better organizing their offerings.
Regardless of your company’s size, effective brand architecture can help you:
Target the Needs of Specific Customer Segments
Better organizing your offerings enables you to more effectively segment your brand messaging, ensuring each of your target audiences hears what you want them to hear—and gets precisely what they’re looking for.
Significantly Reduce Marketing Costs
When brand hierarchy is architected in a logical, intuitive way, your marketing efforts are exponentially more efficient. Clearly defined brand architecture opens up opportunities for cross-promotion between brands, as well, enabling you to get more out of your marketing spend.
Clarify Brand Positioning
Nothing clarifies your brand positioning like clearly defined brand architecture. Improving the clarity of your brand positioning results in more impactful messaging and a more readily apparent competitive differentiation. It’s like giving your brand a high-performance tune-up.
Facilitate Growth and Bolster Stakeholder Confidence
The modular nature of an intuitive brand architecture makes it vastly easier to add brand extensions like new products or services as your company grows. And well-managed, growth-oriented brands are a reassuring sign for investors and employees alike.
Enhance Customer Awareness
When a brand’s various divisions are not clearly delineated, they must rely on the corporate brand to capture the attention of the marketplace. Brand architecture gives your brand the power of diversification by highlighting the unique strengths of its distinct sub-brands.
Build and Protect Brand Equity
The upshot of all of the above benefits is the ultimate competitive advantage for any company: brand equity. Growing your brand equity provides compound returns, as industry authority and market valuation grow with it.
It's pretty clear that brand architecture is super important for businesses of all sizes to organize their offerings and boost their brand awareness.
By figuring out the organizational hierarchy of a company's brands, sub-brands, products, and/or services, businesses can enjoy a bunch of benefits like better targeting specific customer segments, lowering marketing costs, clarifying brand positioning, making growth easier, increasing customer awareness, and building and protecting brand equity.
Effective brand architecture can give businesses more control over how their brand is perceived and give them a competitive edge in the market.
Not sure how to get started? Perhaps a quick chat would help?
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