Brand Architecture

Regular Animal will help you develop your brand architecture and define the branding structure within your organization.

A clear brand architecture helps establish hierarchical relationships within your organization’s structure and product portfolio and explains the connections between your organization’s master brand, sub-brands, products, and service lines.

Understanding your brand architecture can help you to manage a brand portfolio more effectively, clarify your brand identity, solidify corporate hierarchy, enable accurate customer perception, and expand product or service lines. Whether from a marketing perspective or a growth angle, documenting your organization’s brand architecture can help you tell a more compelling brand story.

A strategically conceived and rigorously deployed brand architecture is key to supporting organization objectives, maximizing efficiency, and optimizing performance. In addition, by establishing brand architecture, we help brands manage the perception of their business, growth potential, and relationships within their organizations.

Brand Portfolio Analysis

Determining the existing landscape of an organization’s brand portfolio is becoming an increasingly complex task. Brands continue to diversify with increasing frequency, acquiring multiple properties with multiple divisions or featuring various product lines with their corresponding sub-brands.

Undergoing a brand portfolio analysis remains a crucial component of brand architecture. Understanding and assessing a brand’s portfolio requires a clear understanding of the brand and the brand’s objectives. These insights, along with an analysis of existing gaps, overlaps, and brand investments, form the foundation of an actionable portfolio assessment.

Once completed, it is possible to identify what brands, divisions, and products are core; what their role and importance are within the brand hierarchy; which, if any, products or divisions need to be eliminated, escalated, or merged; and in what categories the brand is strongly or poorly positioned to compete.

Brand Architecture Modeling

There are multiple brand architecture approaches, each with its benefits and drawbacks. Depending on the brand strategy, the approach taken will differ. Brands that span varying industries, channels, and countries may all require vastly different modeling structures based on any number of variables. Our Miami-marketing agency evaluates all the options and develops the balance that each organizational situation demands. Evaluating and selecting the appropriate brand architecture model is key to establishing a recommended portfolio model for a long-term architecture solution.

Increasingly complex brand portfolios and diverse audiences will even require some brands to adopt multiple or hybrid models to remain relevant. Brand architecture modeling creates organizing scenarios and tests each with specific criteria against the business strategy. It evaluates how many types of brands a company should have (master brand, sub-brands, parent brands, umbrella brands, etc.) with how those brands should be organized (a branded house, endorsed brands, a house of brands, etc.). Accurately evaluating and selecting the correct model is key to establishing long-term brand stability and focus.

Brand Linkage

After establishing the relative importance of company and product brands within the selected brand architecture model, we create the visual relationships that will help to communicate the breadth and scope of the organization or product/service line.

After establishing the relationships between your company brands, sub-brands, products, and services, and the relative importance of each concerning the others within the selected brand model, our creative agency can build a visual hierarchy among your portfolio of brands­­.

We do so in a way that communicates the degrees of associations across and between your portfolio. The visual hierarchy presents a graphical view of your company from the top down and addresses naming conventions for all elements. When complete, the result is an at-a-glance view of the architectural foundation of your organization and how its components align to create your overall brand structure.

Brand Transition Planning

Codifying the brand architecture for future use and creating a strategy for how eliminated and modified brands will transition into the new model require careful planning and close coordination with clients.

Once we’ve determined your brand architecture, we will codify it for future use and create guidelines for transition planning to the new model. This process requires careful preparation and coordination.

Together with key stakeholders, we determine how to shift from the existing brand structure to what it is to become. External benchmarks, such as brand equity and category activity, are considered, as are internal considerations, such as strategic imperatives, available budgets, resources, inventories, etc. Finally, the creation of a formal transition plan and production of systems, assets, and governance help ensure goals, priorities, and strategies are put in place, and the new architectural design can have a successful and smooth transition with minimal disruptions to the day-to-day functions of your organization.