Should you simplify your brand architecture?
Sometimes your brand architecture organically becomes more complex over time, and pausing to reflect on how that is serving you is always a fruitful exercise. Even if you decide to maintain what you have, you might find ways to streamline effort a little in the process. Here we explore brand architecture and what to consider when assessing whether change is required.
Hi everyone, I’m Jodie and I’m the MD at Tiny Hunter, and recently we asked you what keeps you up at night?
One of the things that came through was around complexity in terms of your brand architecture. Maybe over time you’ve actually got a couple of brands – you’ve got sister brands, or maybe you’ve got sub brands, product brands, you’ve branded a key service. Sometimes you’re using that, sometimes you’re using your main brand – it’s just gotten a little complicated. One of the places to start is with your audience. Is the audience the same for these brands, or is it quite different? Because if it’s quite different, it may well mean that separate is better and you just need really good brand guidelines and clarity in terms of what you’re doing and when. If the audiences are the same, there may be some benefits in streamlining things, in terms of managing things well internally.
The other thing that you need to think about is the market. Have you been doing this for a long time, and doing it well, so you’ve actually got quite strong equity in terms of these brands, where making a change could be detrimental? And that’s not to say that you can’t make the change, it just means you need to be aware of that – you need to communicate well, manage it well, so that you can take people on the journey. You just want to have as much understanding as possible. You want to do research, you want to talk to your current customers, you want to think about your potential customers, you want to do a real deep dive when you’re thinking about making a decision like this.
And you do really want to think about what is the impact of the complexity in terms of us doing a good job? Maybe you just don’t have the bandwidth to have multiple brands and be doing a great job and you need to streamline things just so that you can do everything well. You need to think about those factors as well. You want to do a deep dive, you want to talk to experts, make sure you’re making the right decision. Do a good old fashioned pros and cons list. What are the pros and cons of keeping the complexity that we currently have, and what are the pros and cons of streamlining things? Once you’ve got a really good picture of the two different paths, then you can not only make the right choice, but you can better manage the changes that need to happen from that point on so that it’s really successful.
That’s it from me, it’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: July 26, 2023