"Brand Real" - Laurence Vincent

WHEN TO FOCUS ON BRAND ARCHITECTURE

”..You should use your brand architecture to create leverage across the portfolio. To do this, you have to answer important questions about each brand in your portfolio, including the master brand:

- How typical is the brand of its product or service category?

- How much does this subbrand rely upon brand-specific associations of a parent-brand? Are those brand-specific associations strong enough to provide competitive advantage for this subbrand?

- How broad or narrow is the total brand portfolio?

- ***Who is the target audience for the brand, and what is their dominant mode of thinking about brands in the category (i.e. analytic versus holistic)? 

- How typical or atypical is this brand in comparison to other brands within the portfolio?

- How well can audiences outside the organization relate brands withing the portfolio to one another? Is it intuitive? if not, how much effort does it take to sort it correctly?

… there are specific moments in time when you should pay particular attention to brand architecture and focus on these questions. The are:

- Mergers and acquisitions…

- Cost-cutting…

- Crisis…

- Hygiene…

- Diversification (p 91-94) …”

"When I was a Cub Scout, one of my troop leaders advised us boys to focus on our character, not our personality. He said the boy who focuses on developing his personality might win a popularity contest, but the boy who focuses on building his character will triumph in life. That sounds like a cliche you might find on a Successories poster, but it stuck in my head when I was an impressionable youn hoping to make something of myself. It sticks in myhead today when brand managers ask me how to create a more vibrant brand identity. The best brands develop a voice that reflects their character,not desirable personality traits. We can thinks of many ways to describe that character, but the truth is that it is always revealed through actions (p 159-160)."

"… a brand’s behavior should always be guided by a credible promise that results in a consistently strong experience. Brand identity allows brands to get credit for such an experience by giving them a signature. In the same way that you look to the bottom of a painting to identify the artist, a brand identity helps us connect an experience to a brand (p 168)."