Transcript
A (0:00)
You almost don't notice when an architecture is working really well because there's no problems.
B (0:05)
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.
A (0:26)
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.
B (0:56)
Amazing. Well, Profit, that's where David Acker was also, right?
A (1:00)
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.
B (1:32)
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?
A (2:01)
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.
