In this series, Headline’s Head of Brand Molly Martell breaks down the elements of the Brand Plan – why they matter, and how to build them.
Whether you spent $2 and two minutes on it… or $2 million and two years on it… whether you “believe in Brand” or not… if you have a business, you have a brand. Of course, some brands are more intentional than others. This intention is what we call your “Brand Plan.”
At Headline, we recommend having a Brand Plan, or else risk letting your brilliant business worm around the world wearing a random logo, spewing copy, not really knowing what it’s doing here. What’s worse, onlookers – your potential customers, investors, employees – will wonder what your business is doing here, too. That leaves you, the founder and your team, spending a whole lot of time explaining and convincing, which is exhausting for everyone.
Creating Brand Architecture
It’s tempting (and quite common) to launch products as they come to you – building, naming, and designing one without anticipating the next. This can catch up with teams, as suddenly they’re faced with a mix of products that may seem partially or unintentionally related, or just completely disparate. This complicates consumer perception, pricing and packaging, marketing strategies, and even staffing.
To avoid this, you need a product blueprint. This blueprint is your brand architecture.
Traditionally, brand architecture has been divided into two camps: a Branded House, or a House of Brands.
A Branded House is one in which a master brand lends its identity to each of its subsidiaries. Each brand feels as though it is part of the same immediate family.
A House of Brands is one in which a master brand launches sub-brands, each with their own identities. These brands might appear to be more distant/estranged relatives.
Here’s the secret: it’s impossible to force your business into one or the other – it’s less of a choice between the two, and more of a spectrum between the two. But pretend you don’t know that, because the act of choosing an approach will keep you organized as your business grows. It helps to give everything a place, or else everything will be out of place–always.
Let’s get into it.
House of Brands
The House of Brands strategy requires developing and managing separate brands. The challenges here are clear. Developing one incredible brand is an undertaking. Developing several brands will require more resources. (Not to mention, you will lose approximately 12 days of sleep just naming and trademarking each entity.) The investment extends beyond upfront identity development, and flows into the ongoing maintenance and growth of each brand. You’ll manage separate Instagram handles, marketing campaigns, websites – and build equity on an individual basis.
There are upsides to this approach, too. Perhaps you’re marketing to very different audiences and simply cannot earn credibility with both simultaneously. This is rare (people have more in common than you may think) but possible. Or, maybe you’re selling products that are so unrelated that they may undermine one another – a House of Brands will allow you to keep things separate.
My favorite example of a House of Brands is Target. Target has created a portfolio ranging from children’s toys (Gigglescape) to personal care (up&up), to kitchenware (Figment) and many others. I love this example because Target has fully owned the responsibility of managing different brands, spending decades building teams of branding and business experts to nurture these unique units. This approach can be successful - but only when you have the human power and budget to wholeheartedly parent each of your brand children equally.
Branded House
The costs and benefits of a Branded House are essentially the inverse of a House of Brands. But let’s start with the obvious positive: a Branded House allows you to concentrate your resources on building equity in a single brand. When your master brand shines, so too will your sub-brands. A single team can manage your brand design, marketing, and communications. This approach makes sense in most scenarios.
The downsides are that you may feel limited by a single identity, particularly if you’ve built an inflexible master brand (we will discuss how to avoid this later). You may need to borrow credibility from other brands through partnerships as you launch new products, which can be okay. And, when your master brand is tarnished, it’ll take your sub-brands down with it.
If you plan to consolidate or expand through acquisition, it will be difficult not to welcome new brand identities into your mix. You will either argue with founders during the acquisition about changing their company name, or embrace that they will enter the family without fully fitting into the existing visual and verbal DNA (e.g. Nike acquiring Converse, or Google acquiring Youtube).
Amazon is a fabulous example of a branded house. The majority of Amazon's offerings ladder up to the parent brand, whether they're a music brand, shopping, or SaaS. While these products are not related, you can count on any of them to share the parent company's customer-centric ethos and tech-powered efficiency. You probably also feel the same level of ambivalence yet reliance on whichever Amazon products you use (they share equity, for better and worse!). One brand, many products. Now of course, we need to note that over time, Amazon has acquired brands like Zappos and Whole Foods, who have retained their identities. Again, it’s impossible to be 100% clean about this, always.
The Hybrid or Endorsed Brand Option
If we’re thinking of Brand as a spectrum, the Hybrid approach falls in the middle. In this scenario, standalone brands are endorsed by a parent company (such as Courtyard, by Marriott). The benefit here is that a parent brand lends credibility to its sub-brands. This middle approach borrows tradeoffs from each side of the spectrum, but can often work well.
Reality check
Remember, not all brands fit neatly into one of these structures. Even Apple bends the rules, with product nomenclature falling into the “Mac” (Macbook) category, the “i” (iPhone) category, or the “Apple” (Apple Watch) category. But while their naming structure sometimes goes astray, the Apple experience is always unmistakably and 10000% Apple. Their consistency with the brand experience more than compensates.
You must know the rules before you can bend them.
So what path to choose?
Though the lawlessness of the House of Brands can be alluring, for most startups and emerging businesses, it makes sense to invest some upfront work in developing a scalable Branded House framework.
Now that I’ve convinced you, I suggest starting by considering your naming system. Remember, your product names will be anchored by the parent brand + a descriptive modifier (as in FedEx Ground). So, select a category of modifier – will it be hierarchically named for features? Or, for its user types? Its functionality? You’ll want to stick within the confines of that modifier category so that your customers instantly understand each product.
You’ll also want to leave room for future extensions, and consider to what extent your new offerings will be related. I want to re-emphasize the first part of that sentence: imagine future extensions. Even if you’re launching a dating app and feel pretty sure that you can win that market and run a multi-trillion-dollar business, you need to at least go through the exercise of imagining potential extensions of your product. Maybe you’ll open a restaurant, or launch a wine business, or a personal styling service – you never know where your business might take you. So, leave the door open!
To leave you with a few takeaways…
- Give your business a name that does not limit you to a single category. Hint: your name should sell a feeling, not a product. More on this in our next article!
- Always keep in mind the potential for brand extensions, and leave your brand open.
- Before your business grows, make a deliberate decision about where you’ll fall on the spectrum of Branded House to House of Brands, then commit! But also, be flexible.
See you next time to discuss naming!