Brand architecture and brand strategy
What brand architecture models do companies you know use?
There are several ways to look at the topic but I liked the one as seen below. The described brands and their general marketing strategies are very familiar to most of us, so it really helps clarify how brand strategy can be built successfully with all different kinds of architechtures.
Monolithic architechture focuses strongly towards creating one strong brand and building a portfolio of products and services around it.
Endorsed architechture is very similar no monolithic, but it usually has a larger variation in their portfolio of products and services.
Unilever is a great example of a free-standing architechture where all the brands they own act as their own, unique brand but the general guidelines are provided by Unilever.
Hybrid architechtures have the qualities of the others but can be mixed.
Which brand architectures are good for different products and services?
In my opinion all these architechtures can be highly succesfull if done correctly. Companies should carefully choose which one to use since there can be up- and downsides to all of them.
I wanted to bring Virgin Group as an example for a Branded House. Virgin Group is a company with a large brand portfolio with everything from travel, lifestyle, music, gaming, mobile, healthcare etc.
Obviously they have done it right since Richard Branson is one of the most known billionaires out there, but for me the Virgin brand doesn’t particularly feel appealing. In my opinion, Virgin could’ve been built through a House of Brands as well. This way, they still would have the advantage of resources of a large company to help build the other sub-companies.
For example, someone mentioned the risk of tarnishing the brand reputation throughout the companies if one fails to deliver or has a PR catastrophe.
Also what I find confusing is the inconsistancy of the brand. Just the fact that they are present in so many areas of business and the colors, typography of the logos are so different from eachother.
At the same time having the Virgin name in everything can build a certain trustworthiness.
Analyse the brand strategy and architecture of a chosen company.
H&M Group has several brands under it working with the Hybrid model. Each one caters to the needs of a different customer group.
H&M as a brand is the most conservative one and looks out to reach probably the largest target group out of all the brands. The rest of the brands have very different mission statements and aim to target much smaller customer groups.
Each launch has been carefully thought of and they have followed the trends of the constantly changing Fashion industry. Now that fast fashion has raised a lot of controversy, the newest launches include brands like /Nyden which has a brand new approach to creating fashion. They don’t design by season but just relevant drops throughout the year.
Sources:
The Cut. 2018. Has This 35-Year-Old Swedish Man Figured Out the Future of Fashion? URL: https://www.thecut.com/consent.html?redirect_uri=%2F2017%2F12%2Foscar-olsson-nyden-hm-millennial-brand.html%3Fvia%3Dgdpr-consent&redirect_host=www.thecut.com&orig_qs= Accessed: 10.9.2018
