Brand Architecture

A brand is a brand is a brand - or is it? In the past, marketers dealt with simple brand structures with few extensions, sub-brands and endorsed brands due to a relatively simple environment with fairly uncomplicated business strategies. Today marketers face the complexities of market fragmentation, channel dynamics, global realities and business environments that have drastically changed their tasks. In addition, there is pressure to leverage brand assets in part because of the prohibitive cost of creating new brands.

"To cope with these pressures," says HerdBuoys Branding and Design Director, Veejay Archary, "marketers have had to create and manage brand teams that are often intricate and involved, encompassing multiple brands and complex structures comprising various sub-brands and endorsed brands." This set of challenges has created what Archary refers to as "brand architecture" - essentially the building blocks of a brand.

Brand architecture is an organising structure of the brand portfolio that specifies brand roles and the nature of relationships between brands. Coherent brand architecture enhances the impact, clarity and synergy of a brand and thus helps to avoid market weakness, confusion, wastage and missed opportunities. It explains why certain brands choose to focus upon the master brand in their marketing and advertising efforts, whilst others highlight the various components or sub-brands making up the master brand. To state an example, Southern Sun Hotels have chosen to allow their separate sub-brands Inter-Continental, Holiday Inn, Formule-1 to stand alone by organising them in a manner with which consumers can easily identify. Says Archary, "This ensures that should anything untoward happen to one of these brands, it doesn't impact negatively upon the others or the master brand for that matter."

On the opposite side of the spectrum, however, is the case for BMW motor vehicles. In this instance, the mother-brand seems to have developed an overarching significance in the consumer's mind. This explains why people will choose to say "I drive a BMW" and not "I drive a 3-series or 5-series". The danger herein lies in the fact that, should any of the sub-brands experience negative publicity resulting in a poor brand image, the mother-brand, and thus, all the sub-brands, are also adversely affected.

Staying with the car brands, Volkswagen's (VW) sub-brands - Golf, Jetta, Passat - seem to receive precedence over the mother-brand. You seldom hear someone referring to their vehicle as a "VW", but rather by the sub-brand name of "Golf" or "Jetta" etc. Whilst clearly separate entities, however, the sub-brands' association with the mother-brand is a close one, playing upon the proud heritage which VW possesses in South Africa.

In the case of endorsed brands, a new or sub-brand chooses to align itself with a well-known brand and in so doing provides consumers with a positive brand association. This can be as obvious as the utilisation of the identical logo such as gaming entity Tsogo Sun's utilisation of Southern Sun logo identity or it can be more subtle such as the utilisation of the same colours, fonts, logo shape and other brand elements. Another case in point is the recent addition of the "Nescafé" name to the well-known Nestlé brand, Ricoffy. This positive association validates the brand by aligning Ricoffy with the more expensive Nescafé brand.

Lastly, there is a house of brands. The variation between a branded house and a house of brands vividly describes the two extremes of alternative brand architectures. A branded house uses a single master brand to span a set of offerings that operate with only descriptive sub-brands. For example, South African Airways, Sony, Johnson & Johnson operate a large number of products under the master brand using this "branded house" strategy.

The house of brands strategy, in contrast, involves an independent set of stand-alone brands, each maximising the impact on a market. As Sony is a branded house, Procter & Gamble is a house of brands that operates over 80 major brands, largely with little link to P&G or to each other. In doing so, P&G sacrifices the economies of scale and synergies that come with leveraging a brand across multiple businesses. In addition, there may be those brands that cannot support investment themselves. They risk stagnation and decline, and P&G sacrifices brand leverage in that the individual brands tend to have a narrow range.

Ends Archary, "Whether to choose to focus upon the mother-brand, endorsed brand or the sub-brand is obviously totally dependent upon each brand's different circumstances. Brand hierarchies need to be created according to these individual characteristics of each brand."