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- [00:00]
A
You almost don't notice when an architecture is working really well because there's no problems.
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B
Hey everyone. In this episode we're talking about brand architecture with Felicia Rose in Zweig. Finally, a deep dive into what brand architecture actually looks like, what the outcomes can be and what to pay attention to. So buckle up and let's talk branding.
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A
I'm an independent strategy consultant. I've been doing brand and marketing consulting for a very long time, probably about 20 plus years at this point. And currently, as I said, I'm independent. I worked at Profit for about almost 14 years, both in New York and London, and I'm based in London now and I'm currently working with creative business company for the last year and a half or so as well, kind of working with them on their clients.
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B
Amazing. Well, Profit, that's where David Acker was also, right?
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A
Yeah, he's the vice chairman. He's been affiliated with Profit since the early 2000s or so. So yeah. So a lot of my thinking about what we're going to talk about today is really informed by his initial work on brand portfolio strategy and brand architecture. So I didn't, I haven't done a lot of work very closely with him, but I know him reasonably well and I've consulted him many, many times with really challenging kind of brand strategy topics and issues. And he's pretty much a genius on this topic.
- [01:32]
B
Yeah. Amazing that you have got to be so close to, well, what we could consider to be somewhat of a legend in this space. Of course, maybe like, of course David Aker talks a lot about brand architecture. Could you quickly elaborate on how important is brand architecture for brands and maybe after that, what are some common misconceptions about it?
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A
Sure. I think of brand architecture is really a key part of brand strategy and I think it's the part of brand strategy that people, they nod their heads at the topic, but they don't really necessarily know that much about it. They usually start with, oh yeah, I've heard of House of Brands or Branded House or a hybrid. And that's kind of about as much as people know. I think when I started to do brand architecture work back in, I guess, 2006, and at that point what was critical in thinking about that was kind of almost its relationship to what we call brand portfolio strategy. And that's something that David Aker had, I believe, coined as sort of a discipline. And that really kind of gets into really what brands do you need to do, what you need to do. And brand architecture is really the, in some ways the mechanism that kind of comes along with that. It's a strategy in itself, certainly, and it really gets into what are the roles and the relationships of all the brands and parts of your portfolio. And you know, it's really, it's very much a discipline in a lot of ways, both in terms of like discipline as a noun from the standpoint that it's a practice and a way of thinking, but it also requires a lot of discipline to do it. Well, I think when it comes to like the misconceptions about it, as I said, I think it's something that when you do a lot of it, you kind of build up a certain amount of muscle memory when it comes to sort of how to think about it and how to kind of navigate amongst the challenges. But I think where it really often gets complicated is when people start to kind of be driven by their organizational design or their system, or they try and make them do the same things. And that really brand architecture at its best is really led from the outside, not led from the inside. So you certainly want to have the internal alignment when it comes to how you execute it. And it gets hard if your brand architecture is really at odds with your org design, but that's something you have to solve for as opposed to letting the org lead the architecture. I think the second misconception is maybe that it's really your product portfolio or your product architecture. And so I think when people start to use brand architecture to kind of get really sort of down into the weeds of their product architecture, they can get kind of caught up and confused of like, oh, we have all these SKUs, we have all these different models, how do I brand them, how do I name them? And your architecture can kind of set that, but it shouldn't be kind of thought about as one and the same with your product architecture. As we've gotten more into so much of a web driven age and websites are really like that key touch point in terms of how companies kind of make themselves known to others. Architecture and web architecture, information architecture often get kind of confused and people start to say, well, if my brand architecture looks like this, I have to replicate that in my web architecture. And you want to have separate strategies and again, all these things you kind of want to fit together, but they, they shouldn't be one in the same. And then just to continue boring you with this list is also with visual identity and design system and naming system. And again, these are things that should be led by your brand architecture and informed by it, but they're not the same thing. And I think maybe in terms of the biggest misconception of all is that your brand architecture is about how your logos work together. It's got to be more than that. You need to be thinking much more strategically about. About what you're trying to do and how you're trying to communicate.
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B
Yeah, I think that's very important and also an interesting point, because often that's, like, the thing we're looking at is a diagram of some logos, and we're like, oh, that looks nice, and it makes sense, but in reality, often the complexity behind this is, of course, a lot greater. Maybe, like, one of the things that I found interesting was I actually saw this case for Morningstar, which was work. I guess you've worked on it with creative business companies that.
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A
Right? Yeah, yeah. I've been working with them on Morningstar since the end of 2022.
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B
Yeah, so. So, like, I think it's a good example of, like, maybe describe a bit what the situation looked like when they came to you, and I think that could give us a good idea of, like, when is this brand architecture something that needs to be transformed and how to start.
- [06:32]
A
Sure. And I think Morningstar is a great case, not just because it's something that I worked on, but because it's both timely. But I think it's the kind of challenge that I think a lot of companies face, certainly in B2B, but also in B2C. And I can talk separately. I've done a lot of work in consumer packaged goods in particular, and brand architecture there. And that also is really good from an illustrative perspective. But when it comes to Morningstar, sort of, excuse me, been established in the US for 25 years, I think, and was initially kind of founded as a kind of ratings and research company when it comes to some mutual funds. Right. So it's a financial services company, and they're very, very well known for doing what they initially did, and they have a very strong brand for doing that. And they also have a very strong visual identity, logo and design system, which I think has really been a big. A big part of them kind of maintaining both awareness and kind of a lot of consistency in the market when it comes to people seeing and knowing their brand. But how their business has evolved in the last close to a decade or so, but certainly the last five years, is they really expanded a lot of what they do. But the primary challenge is while their businesses are doing well in terms of that expansion, they did some of that organically. They did some of that through acquisition is that the perceptions of what the Morningstar brand is in their frame of reference hadn't really kept pace with that. They were still more known as like a retail kind of oriented company. And retail from a financial services standpoint in the sense of not institutional and not so much like on the professional investor side. And so, you know, the challenge was really like, how do you take this brand that is extremely well known, and you don't want to give up or lose any of those attributes that have made it so successful, but really start to convey to the marketplace in a more innovation, effective way that they do a lot more and that people, we want people to understand that. But it's not just adding one more thing. The way their business has evolved over the years to serve professional investors is they have a lot in data and analytics. And so that sounds like it's the same as fund ratings and research, but it's quite a lot bigger. It's much more technical and analytical and they provide a lot of support there. They have an indexes business, they have a retirement business, they have a wealth business, they have a credit business. And when we started to think about, okay, how do we really convey the breadth and depth of Morningstar externally, in addition to really thinking about their brand positioning and their overall strategy and the value propositions and all those things, we really wanted to think about how we could use brand architecture as part of that strategy to be more effective. And the solution that we came to is it almost sounds like overly simplistic, but part of what you want to do with brand architecture is find the simplest solution. So what we really focused on doing was really keeping Morningstar as that strong master brand, really the kind of the guiding force in the portfolio. And then we introduced a set of family brands really to correspond with those different businesses. And those are intended both to serve as very obvious signals to the marketplace that we're in this business, but also to give some structure and orientation to the different kinds of work that they do, a lot of which is to different kinds of users and buyers, stakeholders.
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B
Yeah, really interesting, probably when looking at this case, and I'll put the link in the show notes for people like, it looks like, and I know these are like theoretical frameworks, it looks like Morningstar became more of like a branded house. Is that correct or.
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A
Yeah, definitely a branded house. Really strong master brand, everything. And I should have mentioned this, sorry, is that all the family brands are basically a construct that, that locks up the Morningstar name and the logo with the family brand. So it's Morningstar Retirement, Morningstar Wealth, Morningstar Indexes. And we made that decision to really keep Morningstar sort of as part of that family brand name. You don't always have to do that by any means. Sometimes you want family brands that are sort of adjacent to or even completely different from your master brand. In this case, we really wanted to build the brand equity flow between the family brands and the master brand. The intent of it was not to build index as a name, it was to build Morningstar indexes, and similarly with the other businesses. So brand equity flows is such a critical kind of concept within brand architecture. It's like you want to be in a branded house. In particular, you want to be sort of designing your strategy and executing your strategy so that the maximum equity flows goes where you want it to. And for us, we wanted the equity flows to go to Morningstar. We wanted, when you start to be able to pick up those attributes of being in those different family brands, as opposed to building, like, and spending the money to build sort of things from scratch.
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B
I really like that metaphor of equity flow. I think it's an interesting way to look at it, not just purely structurally, but more linked to, I guess, what you could call positioning, and maybe if we can tap into that a little bit more. Like, what I always find interesting is if you look at these, let's say, these situations, and I've done this work before for many brands, where it's like, okay, it's chaos. And the obvious solution is let's create order. But in reality, very often the chaos is there for lots of historical and organizational reasons, and it's not so easy to just put on a nice structure. And I'm wondering what goes into making this type of decision, because it does have a lot of consequences beyond the logo system, as you mentioned.
- [12:16]
A
Absolutely. And I should. I'll mention as well with Morningstar, you know, one of the other parts of that challenge that, you know, was not the biggest thing that we were solving for, but certainly one was just that the brand portfolio had grown enormously. And so there was just like all sorts of things, trying to do all sorts of things and fighting with each other. So it's just kind of this big, particularly for a business kind of of their size with the focus areas that they do have. It just didn't make a lot of sense. And people were going in lots of different directions. And that was really, I think, working against their. The brand itself. Right. To sort of say, like, if we want people to have, like, a, you know, consistent idea of what we do, we want things to make sense. We want to be able to really kind of focus on the priorities of the business and kind of growing those core attributes. And for Morningstar, around being transparent, having a lot of integrity, having a long term view. So when we're looking at the brand portfolio and saying, okay, what kind of architecture we need, what kind of positioning is going to kind of support this, all that had to kind of go into just really being very adherent to what the master brand is and is trying to do. So at the same time that we were in the case of Morningstar, and this is not always the case, we're doing a lot of positioning work as well and value prop work for those, for those family brands that we were designing and then also working down into the product portfolio to say, okay, like what really should be a product, what should just have a name? How do we want to think about the naming? So as I said before, whilst brand architecture is not the same thing as design system and naming system and all those, it really has a lot of kind of carryover effects and it affects a lot of what you do from a brand activation perspective. So it helps to give some structure to your messaging architecture to start how you think about how what you say to the market and what you want people to take away from what you say. And that communication is really kind of clear and makes sense. And if there's one thing about architecture, it's like having it make sense. If you don't make sense to the outside world, there's very much, there's not a lot you can do in terms of other brand levers to pull until you make sense because people will just be like, yeah, you're too complicated, I don't understand what you do. And because it's so hard to change brand perceptions anyway, architecture is so useful alongside positioning and some of those other aspects of brand strategy because it really helps you to kind of jumpstart the process of shifting perceptions or building new attributes that you want to build.
- [14:47]
B
Yeah, I think one of the things that, that has always fascinated me when it comes to brand architecture, and I can give you an example, like we have in Belgium here we have our national TV channel which has also lots of radio channels. And these used to be all separate brands, very iconic. We had the rock and roll radio that was called Studio Brussels. And then somewhat. And now we see over the last five years really seeing them grow towards this, this, you know, singular branded house. And I guess from a, like an organizational standpoint, it has a Lot of benefits to go toward, towards that one structure, as you said, like the equity flow and the way it's set up. But on the other hand, there's so much like emotional connection to all of these, like smaller brands. And that's often the case, I guess, with it with a house of brands where you have specific brands talking to specific people in a specific way. And I'm wondering, like, what is the tipping point of where do you see the moment where it becomes a better idea to go towards the singular branded house structure versus keeping brands their separate identity and their disconnected structure?
- [16:06]
A
Yeah, I think it really depends on the business. I certainly wouldn't say that the branded house is the holy grail. Right. I think it is the right strategy for some companies, but for a lot of companies, like a house of brands, like, is the right strategy, right? Like if you think about the, you know, like mentioned sort of packaged goods before, like if you look at a company like Mars, like Mars is the corporate brand, but like all of the, with the exception of the Mars bar itself, every single other brand in that portfolio is a different brand.
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B
Right.
- [16:36]
A
And so a lot of consumer goods, you want to do that because you want to be able to actually tell different stories. You want to actually, you're out there to create sort of more choice for the consumer and you want to kind of create a lot of that choice. When you think about maybe a media organization like the BBC that has really been very much like a branded house kind of organization, whether it's BBC Sounds or BBC iPlayer, all those things in the UK, all of those are very heavily linked to that story that the BBC wants to tell at the center. Conversely, when you have like either strong individual brands and, and potentially going after different audiences or trying to do different things in different markets, so there's a lot of reason why you would want to have different brands and actually position them differently. And I think for me the maybe key question to ask is, can I tell a story and can I tell the story that I want to tell? So if you're a house of brands and your intent is actually to tell a story of like, we have lots of different parts of our business that go in lots of different places. If the story is at the corporate brand level or like a holding company kind of level, and you can tell that story effectively to your, to your shareholders or to the media and having that house of brands and actually like, if you have the money to invest in supporting them and maintaining them appropriately, which is a key factor in a house of Brands, because brands are. Brands are expensive, right? So if you're going to have a lot of brands, you have to have, like, the money to support them. You have to have strategies to support them. You have to have people to know what they're doing to support them. But if you can tell that story that bring them together in the way that you're trying to tell them, then that's fine. That's like the right strategy for you. But where you see a lot of companies go wrong is that they have a lot of brands, but they don't spend to support them, and they don't put any energy into actually keeping them as brands. So then it just sort of becomes a little bit of a. Sort of a shallow kind of portfolio, because you've got things that might be recognizable, but they're recognizable only up to the point in time that somebody knew what they were. And if you've done something different, but you haven't told the market that, then it doesn't really matter that you've. You've done something different because nobody knows.
- [18:39]
B
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I've seen that even on, like, a level of really, like, smaller companies, like, having the idea of, like, okay, let's create a separate brand for this and a separate for this. And it's more like. Also, I think part of it. I don't know if you've seen this, but part of it is just like wanting something new and, and putting a new brand out there as a. As a way. I don't know if you've seen that, but I've seen that for sure a.
- [19:06]
A
Billion times in brands. I mean, I've been working in brand for a long time, and I'll probably get smacked for saying this, but so much of brand is. Is ego, right? And people, people, companies and people want to create brands because they get credit for it, right? And they get to show off something new that they did. And it's fun to build brands. I mean, I've built lots of brands and it's super fun, and it's great to kind of work on that. And it's really hard to make an existing brand do something new. It's much easier at a point in time. It's much easier to start something new because you can get attention to it, particularly if you're willing to sort of throw money at the problem. But the issue comes, is that when you've got, like, lots of different people in the business creating lots of different brands at lots of different points to do lots of different things, and they don't have a sort of story of how they fit together or what they're trying to do. You kind of very quickly can go from a very sort of thoughtful portfolio to something that's like exploded. And then the other thing is that to that point of not investing in brands is people often equate and I get very maybe purist about it between brands and names. Right. Like just because something you've named something doesn't make it a brand. It's not a brand until like you've invested in it. And people actually, then it has like sort of things that are associated with it until it actually has like equity. Right. It's not otherwise you can name lots of things. And brand architecture, you know, in the work that I've done, at least we usually think about the. Probably the top part of the architecture is brands and the lower part of the architecture is names. The lowest part of the architecture is stuff. And I don't put stuff onto the PowerPoint chart. But names are really there for what we call navigation and selection. How do I make my way around this portfolio? How do I get to the right stuff? And names can be really useful signals for that. But your brands are really about driving purchase or driving usage. And if you don't intend for a brand to do that, then don't create a brand. Because if you just need a way to help people get to your thing over here, like name it and do something with it, whether on your website or an in product experience to get people over there. But don't like sort of create a sort of false construct that it's a brand. Because then you just send your people down a lot of rabbit holes and then if they don't have the investment or the buy in from the organization for it to be a brand, then things get very confused very quickly.
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B
Yeah, I think like when it comes to implementing this brand architecture and maybe even before that just getting like a sign off on, okay, we're all aligned that this is the right way forward. There's like two big hurdles. One of them is getting stakeholders, like the main stakeholders on board. And then the other one is probably more like on the organizational level getting it down to the floor where people actually have to do it. But maybe let's start with that first one. Like how do you make sure that you get everybody that's like executive stakeholder, important to be on board for this kind of thing? Because I can imagine like it's a very complex exercise and there's a lot of different opinions like do you have any ideas on how to get stakeholders aligned on this type of exercise?
- [22:24]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really super important point and question because it's kind of hard to do. Right. We all sort of know that marketing sometimes has a big seat at the table, but more often marketing isn't necessarily like in the right seat at the table at the, whether the ELT or a senior leadership team. So even sort of telling someone that like, you know, I want to do brand architecture work, people glaze over very quickly and they're like, sure, you go ahead and do your, do your little project and involve this if you need to. And we really want people to think about. They don't have to use the words brand architecture. It sounds really kind of theoretical and you're, you don't have to sort of put it that way. But if you go to your executive team, if you're a CMO or a head of brand or even somewhere within the marketing organization, like we have this opportunity or we have this problem and we need to start to solve it, and solving it starts to think about actually like our brand and all the parts of our brand portfolio and our business and how we're structured. We think that's really going to help to create more kind of clarity, create more simplicity. It's going to drive business. It's going to create like efficiency. So I think the way to sort of take it on with senior leadership is to like, presumably they're going to agree with the problem you're identifying. If they don't agree that you have a problem, that's a different issue. But presuming that they recognize that there is some kind of problem, you going to them with a solution and saying the solution is not brand for brand sake, it is to drive these things that are really kind of business objectives and commercial objectives. And there's usually some internal objectives there, but it rarely works if you just lead with the internal part of it, like saying like, you know, our people need some more structure. It doesn't usually move the needle with a leadership team telling them that it's going to actually like drive customer understanding, drive business, enable, cross sell and upsell. Those kinds of things are very, they usually get people's attention at our leadership team and you can start to have the right conversation with them. So whether it's a matter of getting them to sign off to the project, but you also want to ideally involve them in kind of the, the discovery process at the beginning of the work, because usually they will often have some Ideas as well, of like, from a business storytelling perspective, from a commercial objective perspective, they can help you either tweak your objectives or help you refine your strategy. And then once they're kind of involved a little bit at the beginning, you have kind of license to keep them involved a little bit more as you go along. And you have license to go back to them and say, like, this is our recommendation and ask them to sign off on that recommendation. So rather than having them sort of sign off on a project and kind of go back and then execute the project, make them a stakeholder for the work, make them not necessarily accountable for it, but make them kind of very, very involved and give them a decision making role if you feel like it's appropriate to do that.
- [25:05]
B
Yeah, that sounds great. And I guess what's really important is indeed clarifying what the problems are and really making that very tangible for them so they can see the value in bringing that solution. Maybe one thing, I think a lot of people listening are often like doing brand strategy work. And one of the key things in brand strategy is of course positioning. It's maybe a bit of an abstract question, but how do you see the relationship between these two big things that need to be solved for a brand?
- [25:42]
A
I mean, it's abstract in a way, but it's also the flip side of that is that like they have to work in lockstep, right? So if your positioning is how people, your brand is how people perceive, your positioning is kind of what you're establishing, is the way that you want to be, want to be perceived and kind of those attributes that you want to create, your architecture should deliver on that, right? So a good architecture would sort of line up with your positioning. So if your positioning is to be this kind of company for these people to do this obviously in a more aspirational way, then the architecture should kind of mirror that to the extent so that they like kind of come to you cold or they hear about your brand, what they see in your architecture should kind of play out to a certain extent and align with that positioning. So, you know, it's very hard to kind of do architecture with a brand that doesn't have like strong sort of positionings in that portfolio. Because you want your architecture to be really driven, as I mentioned before, on like how you want those brand equities to flow, how you want things to fit together, how you want to tell the story. The positionings within your portfolio really are that story to a certain extent. And so when you think about how your architecture should be set up. And most of the time you're not setting an architecture up from a clean sheet of paper. You're starting with something that may or may not be a mess. And then you very rarely see a company that has really clear, really thoughtful, really well architected positionings and messagings and a really bad brand architecture. It's usually like there's a very strong correlation that you see between them because you've either got people that are good at doing brand strategy within the company or from outside, or you don't. And the reason in some ways that you don't necessarily think about the relationship between the architecture and the positioning when it's working well is because everything makes sense. You start to see it when you've, you know, if you've done like a recent acquisition, that's often like a trigger to really kind of take a second step at your architecture, or you've divested something, or you're sort of really thinking about going into a new market or introducing something completely new. And the architecture then sort of may be to solve an immediate opportunity or problem. But then the backside of the relationship to positioning is like, okay, we need to make sure that our positionings reflect now this new way of telling our story from an architecture perspective. And where do we need to either refine our positionings to be more inclusive and to get this equity flowing in the right way and get the equities that we want in customers minds.
- [28:15]
B
Yeah, love that. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe like to go back to our hurdles we talked a bit about. The first hurdle is like, okay, let's get staked stakeholders on board. The second one is also really interesting, I think is how to get the full company and of course all of its subsidiaries to actually take on this new architecture and embody it. Because what you do see a lot in the field is like the actual historical way of how the company was built is still out there in the wild. People are still using names, still old logos, picking up the phone, like that sort of stuff. Like, I know this is of course depending on the size of the company, something maybe that is so far downstream that it's not easy. But I don't know if you have any ideas of like how to at least start planting the seeds so that it's implemented across this big company.
- [29:11]
A
Yeah. And it's much easier said than done. And I think you're absolutely right. It's, it's very hard, especially when you make really big changes to an architecture. Like people are very resistant to change both because it's, you know, change is hard certainly. And then from a mindset perspective, they're attached to something. So if you've kind of rationalized the portfolio and gotten rid of some brands. But I think the most important thing is like brand architecture should not be like imposed on something that they should execute that they're hearing about for the first time. Like if someone is important to the execution or the activation of your portfolio, they should be involved in the process very, very early, right? And obviously you're not going to have, if you have a very big marketing organization, you're not going to be able to have all of those people involved, but you'd want to have as many different parts of the business represented in the work kind of as stakeholders. Similar to what I was saying about the executive teams, but from like a discovery perspective, but also to really understand to them like, okay, what are the, what are the implications of various things? So when we're kind of doing brand architecture, we're, we usually sort of set it up in some scenarios and say, okay, we can do this and it would kind of look like this, it would be led like this. This would be the brands that are driving, these are the brands they're endorsing. These are kind of what would sit at the various levels. What are the implications of that? I'm starting to involve other people in the organization that are going to need to work with that portfolio in those conversations about implications and what are the trade offs and what is it, what does it mean? What does it actually look like to put into these practice? Because you know, a brand architecture kind of scenario can look really, really nice on a slide, right? Or on a figma board or mirror board. But once you actually say like, oh, like what does this actually mean for us to do this? And like thinking about not just, you know, you know, a single market, what does this mean for other markets? What is this? What is the carry on effects? Are we making life harder for people internally? So while I said we want to be customer led, you sort of also want to be like very much internally informed when it comes to activation implications. Because if people can't execute it or don't either don't understand it or can't execute it or it makes business harder, by all means do not pursue that strategy. And you should know that before you actually make any kind of recommendation. So it very much I think, I mean I'm a big adherent, I guess to doing something scenario kind of work when it comes to architecture and really play things out it makes things take a bit longer, but it is a much better, much higher likelihood that you will get to the right solution and a solution that can actually be used if you've kind of played out the executional and business implications beforehand.
- [31:51]
B
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe one more question about. You've done a lot of these, so I'm guessing you've seen the best outcomes and maybe also the worst outcomes. What is the best outcome of doing this exercise and rolling it out properly and maybe also on the other side. Or you can start with the negative as well.
- [32:15]
A
Of course. Yeah. I mean, I think the best outcome is you have made everybody's life easier outside the company and inside the company. And that sounds quite pat, I know, but you've kind of reduced your portfolio down to just the brands that you actually need to do what you want to do. That's the objective of this kind of strategy, this kind of work. So you've streamlined, you've told a great story. People sort of understand it. People can kind of work with it internally. And then most importantly, kind of, you hear back in your. Whether it's your brand tracking service or your focus group or anytime you're talking to a customer as a salesperson, like, oh, you know, you guys make a lot more sense. Now, somebody says that that's like, great, or like, somebody kind of comes into the business and they can quickly go through your funnel because they're looking for something and they can get to where they need to go kind of quickly and easily. And people ask them about the process of dealing with you and process of kind of, how quickly or efficiently was I able to do what I wanted to do? Architecture should make that go better. So in an ideal world, like, everybody is kind of happy with kind of what's there, and things kind of feel like they're working properly. People understand that you've kind of built the right equities where you want them, or you're on the path to doing that. So it's, in a way, it's a bit like you almost don't notice when an architecture is working really well because there's no problems, right? There's less of that sort of shiny moment of, you know, the excitement of launching a brand and kind of landing, a positioning or getting, like, great response to creative or something like that. There's a lot of, like, real satisfaction in that. To a certain extent, when an architecture is working really well, you don't notice it, you know, because it's working kind of that optimally.
- [33:58]
B
I Would say, I love that. Removing the ego from. From it, but really making it as frictionless as possible. That's great.
- [34:05]
A
Yeah, I think so. And I mean, the flip side of it is, I mean, it's bad architecture. And I'm not sure if your question is about, like a bad architecture, bad architecture project, but I think in some ways they sort of end up in the same place. Is like bad work is like everybody is unhappy or a bad process. You don't really. You can end up making more of a mess. Right. So you can kind of. While brand architecture is really about simplicity, it's very easy to make a complicated architecture. If you have a company that has lots of different businesses and lots of different products and lots of different kind of features and all things like that you can get yourself like, and I've seen this happen, certainly been a part of it to a certain extent as well, is like you can kind of die in the details of it and trying to sort of solve for. And then you start to fight over, like in the, remember, CPG project, and you're sort of fighting over like, well, is this a form factor or is this a flavor? And you have these very long conversations and at the end of the day, some of those things, like down in the bottom levels of an architecture, they don't really matter. But the fights can be extraordinary. And you can actually burn a lot of goodwill internally if you're ahead of brand trying to run a good architecture project or a bigger brand portfolio strategy. And if you're not listening to people and not really understanding what the needs of their customers are, because there are a lot of people in your business that probably know your customer, know the customer better than you do. And when there's different competing customer needs and different sort of internal challenges, bringing that all together into a simple solution is tough. So you can end up with a lot of unhappy people. So the worst case is that you have a lot of unhappy people outside your business and inside and you've kind of created more, you know, templates for them to fill out or more sort of things for them to do without actually getting any benefits. So, like a bad architecture project just creates a lot of work and doesn't create a lot of value because if you haven't kind of simplified things and made them more intuitive, you've done a bad job.
- [36:10]
B
Yeah, maybe, maybe. One last question before we wrap it up. Like, if people listening want to learn more about this, maybe they're like a strategist or somebody in house thinking about doing this exercise like maybe there's a book piece of knowledge, a thing to go do that they can start learning a bit more about this.
- [36:32]
A
That's a really good question. I was just thinking about that before I got on the phone. I was like, oh, he's going to ask me that question. I don't necessarily know that I have a great answer for it. It's interesting. Obviously I mentioned David Aker before, so I mean, his books, particularly his book on brand portfolio strategy is a classic and really good. I mean, thinking has evolved a lot since then. It's interesting as well. Like, there's not a lot of podcasts on this. I kind of, in preparation for this conversation, I sort of went to see, like, okay, who else is talking about it? And there's like two or three podcasts over the last three years that I could find on Spotify. And so there's not, there's not that much out there. You know, there. There are a lot of good articles, I think, on various sort of sites and sort of resources to kind of look at and people are welcome to get in touch with me and I can kind of steer them to more specific things. It's. Whilst I've tried to kind of provide kind of an overview and I've been bouncing back and forth a lot between B2B and B2C. Like the work is a bit different and some of the thinking is a bit different often between like packaged goods and professional services, for example. Like, that's different kinds of architectures, different kinds of work. So I would say for people, when you're sort of looking for things, just kind of have in mind like what it is that you're looking at. Like a tech company. Architecture is often gotten to in a different sort of with some different strategic thinking than packaged goods, for example. It's not a great answer to your question, but I don't actually think there are a lot of great resources out there that I've seen. So I would sort of point you towards Akir and other. There's a few other people I think that have mentioned architecture. Kevin Keller has talked about architecture, I think, in some of his work. So it's kind of more like the old school class of marketers. I feel like people don't talk about it that much right now, but it's still done a lot.
- [38:18]
B
And that's why you're here. Felicia, I mean, thank you so much. I think you brought already so much clarity. So the last answer, I think start with David Aker. But already listening to this podcast will give people a lot more clarity. So thanks for bringing brand architecture out of the mist and making it as sharp as you did.
- [38:38]
A
Great. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Great to talk to you.
- [38:41]
B
All right, that was it for this episode. As always, if you want to stay up to date on the latest episodes, check out the show notes and find out more interesting stuff about brand strategy and brand building. Visit. Let's talk branding.substack.com that's letstalkbranding.substack.com.