Brand architecture
You’re planning to build a house.
(Bear with us a second.)
You’ve got the tools, you’ve got the team, you’ve got the vision. You can’t wait to lay that first brick. The team races to build it, decorating it with shiny ornaments and furnishing it with fancy furniture. Over time, everyone adds their own twist, building extra rooms and constructing additional floors. Within a few months, there are leaks, cracks in the walls and lots of weird noises.
The whole thing gets out of control. Why? You didn’t hire an architect.
Brand architecture provides an essential framework that ties together various brand elements, unlocking the full potential of your brand equity and creating laser focus for your audience. Without this foundation, brands can become unruly.
As your business evolves and diversifies, your brand portfolio can easily get tangled up. Keeping your brand elements working in tandem is crucial to success, whether you’ve organically developed multiple product lines, acquired distinct entities, or strategically targeted niche markets. A well-defined brand architecture helps build consumer clarity and confidence. A poor one creates ambiguity and confusion.
Ruling the unruly
Brands that wander can lead to missed opportunities, diluted equity and customer confusion. No one wants that.
It’s not just about naming conventions or visual styles, either; it’s also about strategically organising your brands to clarify their relationship internally and externally, target specific audiences, and allow the positive reputation of one brand to benefit others. Brand architecture should be the foundation from which you make branding decisions, keeping your overall offering geared towards business success.
The UnitedUs Process
Creating a clear, compelling, and coherent brand architecture requires a deep understanding of your business, growth strategy and target audience. At UnitedUs, we partner closely with clients to diagnose their current landscape and craft a framework that fits with overarching goals like a glove.
So, the big question is: how do we go about it?
-
First step: deep dive. We jump straight into analysing how your brands are positioned, how they sit among competitors and how they’re perceived both internally and externally.
Case Studies
Prime
You might not notice it initially, but if you delve into Prime’s guidelines, you’ll find they have a branded house model. Under the Prime banner is a big, bold blue core brand, an orange sub-brand for their Foundation, a darker blue, yellow and serif scheme for their thought leadership and a soft pink for their employer brand. All of which are neatly tied together.
Cambridge Healthcare Research
Turning one brand into three — CHR, Vox.Bio and Solici — is no mean feat (if we do say so ourselves). We did this through a ‘House of Brands’ approach that improves design effectiveness via a shared unlying grids and guides structure.
Talk to our Strategy Partner, Natalie,
about nailing your Brand Architecture.
[email protected]
01273 684416
