Josh Dougherty is a brand strategist, speaker, and the founder and CEO of A Brave New, a Seattle-based branding agency that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. They have specific expertise in healthcare technology, employee health and wellness programs, and hospitals and providers. Josh has 15 years experience building new brands from scratch, refreshing existing brands and building strategies to bring those brands to life in the market.
1. What brand architecture is and is not
2. Why brand architecture is an essential part of your brand strategy
3. The four most common brand architecture frameworks
4. For each framework Josh dives into
5. When you should take time to evaluate your brand architecture
6. Why it's essential to keep a constant eye on the interrelation and interactions between your brands and/or products
Additional resources:
And so, the reason why I say this can be neglected is I think in a world where there's a lot of merger and acquisition, there's private equity money entering into the space. Often, there are a couple of playbooks that people follow. The first is, maybe, they merge a couple of companies together and they get rid of one of the companies and one company, their brand remains preeminent.
Another playbook is you have a clear parent company that's acquiring a bunch of different brands and there's a natural playbook of like, "We don't really need to even rename them or rethink how these brands fit into our portfolio. We're just going to stick them into our portfolio, and they're going to live there with all the other brands."
And then finally, you have maybe a company that starts rolling out a number of products. And instead of thinking intentionally about how those products are situated, they just create names for all those products and have them live together.
And I think in the best of cases, if you're intentionally thinking about your brand architecture, it can lead to a couple of really huge benefits. The first is this concept of, one, being of the upsell and cross-sell, two, clearly understanding what audiences each brand exists for, and three, understanding how equity is passed from each sub-brand or product up to the parent brand and vice versa. But if you don't do this work and don't intentionally think about your brand or your brand architecture and maybe take one of the three paths that I've mentioned before, you can end up creating confusion and difficulty for your customer of not understanding, "Which solution is right from me? Where do I need to focus in this moment? What should I care about?" And it can become super hard to sell, right? Let alone create any lasting memory because you have a soup of things that are existing.
So let's recap, I think, moving beyond that esoteric introduction about why brand architecture matters. So there are a few things. First, brand architecture helps you define clearly how your brands interrelate. And this brings clarity to the market, right? Because everyone understands, "Yeah, when I'm thinking of ..." Well, an example out of the consumer market, Apple. Apple is clearly the preeminent brand, but the iPhone is a strong brand in itself and they interrelate together. The iPhone lives on its own, but it's clearly tied into Apple. It lends its credibility to all of Apple's other products, but it's its own standalone brand. And Apple allows it to develop its own identity around that. Well, because it's just sub-brand, it isn't a completely standalone brand. It takes on elements of the overall Apple brand as well. So while having some independence, it still is deeply part of that family. So it allows you to clearly define how the brand interrelates.
I think the other thing brand architecture does, if you spend some time working on it for your brands or your products, is it allows you to define how you'd like to pass brand equity from one brand to another. So you can leverage the strengths and or the weaknesses. Well, mitigate weaknesses, I guess, is what you're trying to do. But leverage the strengths of the more well-known brand in the architecture and mitigate weaknesses from going up and impacting more positively thought brands. For example, if you have an established parent brand and you're about to launch a sub-brand, you might want to use the brand equity of the parent brand to help bring the new brand to life. Why would you do this? Because it'll allow you to gain traction in the marketplace faster. It'll short circuit some of the work that has to be done to get a brand off the ground. And it'll allow you to move quickly.
But alternately, it may be that you want to insulate a brand from the rest of your portfolio. So this is where it could help you, I think, mitigate weaknesses. So this would lead to another type of decision. For example, if you're trying to insulate a brand, you may think, "This brand is higher risk or this brand has high risk, high reward. We're not sure how it's going to work out. So we're going to let it cultivate its own brand identity here. We're going to make it pretty separate from our parent brand so that if it breaks through and it's really successful, we'll reap the benefits. But at the same time, if something goes south, the parent brand won't be impacted." So that's the second point that brand architecture allows you to define how you want to pass brand equity from one brand to another or not pass that equity, whether it's positive or negative.
The third reason that brand architecture matters is that it creates clear paths for upsell and cross-sell across brands or products. Now, it may be the case that you have different products for different audiences. But usually, there are two or three products or two or three sub-brands inside of an organization's portfolio that all focus on the same audience. And having a clear brand architecture allows you to clearly create moments for customers to jump from one to the next so you can increase the amount of dollars that you're bringing in from that customer and not just have them be stuck within one of your brands.
And so those are the three areas of why brand architecture matters. The fourth one is an internal reason. But having a solid and clear brand architecture creates clarity for your internal teams as they're managing the brands. And for your design teams and for your brand management team to know when they're creating assets, when they're marketing at an event, when they're doing any number of those things, it allows them to clearly understand how those brands should show up and manage them separately.
So if we think about why brand architecture matters, why defining this interrelationship matters, in summary, the four reasons are, it helps you define clearly how those brands interrelate, which brings clarity to the marketing your customers. It allows you to define how you want to pass both positive and negative brand equity between each brand. Number three, it offers clear paths for upsell and cross-sell across brands or products. And then the fourth one is it allows for your team internally to be able to manage the brand well.
So that aside, we know what a brand architecture is, generally. We know why it matters. So I wanted to spend the majority of this episode talking through four different brand architecture structures, and I want to give you some nice and clear examples of that from the healthcare space as well of each type of brand architecture structure so that you're able to bring this to life in your mind. Now, this may be review for some. If you've already thought about it, maybe it's a good reminder. But if it's new to you, hopefully, it's simple enough to allow you to grasp on to the major concepts and give you a chance to start doing some more digging and reading in this area so you can start thinking about that for your organization.
So when we think of the four major brand architecture frameworks in their simplest form, they are as follows. One is a branded house. This is the type of brand architecture that has a single brand preeminent over the others. And there's one called the sub-brand brand architecture. This will be similar to Apple, where you have a very strong single brand. But you also have individual brands for reach product. Then there's endorsed brands. So this would be where you maybe have a parent brand, but then it allows the sub-brands to develop their own unique brand identity, and they're simply endorsing those brands. So an example of that would be in the consumer world, Marriott, and Courtyard by Marriott, SpringHill Suites by Marriott, etc., that each of those brands have their own separate brand, but Marriott is still present throughout. And then the final type of brand architecture framework is this idea of a house of brands. So this might be similar to when you think about a large pharmaceutical developer developing a bunch of different drugs and they all have their own standalone separate brands.
So let's dig into each of those a little bit more deeply. And we'll start out by talking about the branded house. I think this is where most organizations start, and especially most startups. People who have started maybe in the venture capital or in the funding rounds or they have a new idea, they usually start with a branded house. So the branded house structure focuses on a single strong brand with descriptive names for its sub-brands or services. So it can be tempting to say, "Well, if I have multiple services, I can't have a branded house." That isn't technically true.
I think the operating principle behind a branded house is that we want to build all the equity in the single parent brand. Each integration with a product, it draws from that equity and contributes to the overall equity of the brand. So if someone loves one portion of the service, they're going to talk about how they love that parent brand, not about the specific service, necessarily. Or they'll say, for example, if we think about something from our normal day-to-day lives, "I love the shipping or copying services that I get from FedEx." It isn't like a separate brand that they love. They love a service, right?
And so an example of this from the healthcare space, because it isn't really helpful for us to talk about just consumer brands when we're worried about how does this play out in healthcare, is symplr. symplr is an organization we've worked with in the past, but they really are a healthcare operations company. And their main focus as an organization is to eliminate complexity, reduce costs, and give time back to teams. So they really have a goal of using their single symplr brand and their operations platform to make the operations of healthcare simpler. It's a nice name to have, right? If you're trying to do that. So they've decided on a branded house. And if you look at their website under the solutions, you'll see this very clearly laid out.
Now, I think there might be one other brand that's mentioned inside of their solutions, and I think that's likely an acquisition or some other element. But their suite of solutions on their website includes 10 to 15 different solutions and they all follow a very structured naming process. And they have names like symplr recruiting, symplr directory, symplr spend analysis. So here, you can see symplr is dominant throughout everything, and they're just using descriptive terms to name their specific solutions, which, in a different architecture, might have their own branded names. But here they're saying, "symplr is our dominant brand. We want everything to relate around the dominant symplr brand, and we're going to have individual point solutions. But when we think about these individual point solutions, we want people to look back and say, 'Yeah, we used symplr's recruiting tool and it was amazing.' Or, 'We use their spend analysis tool and symplr is amazing.'" Everything's about symplr.
And I think the beauty of this type of system, if you can do it, is it allows you to put all your eggs in one basket. And why do I think this is good? Sometimes people think that's a bad thing. But I think in branding, it's good because it takes so much work today in saturated marketplaces to build the thing that every brand wants, which is this idea of unaided recall. We want people to be able to repeat back our name to us without hearing them and to repeat back the core attributes or the essence in our brand without us telling it to them. And if you have a bunch of brands, it's more difficult to get people to have unaided recall versus the strategy that symplr has used here. It allows them to always be emphasizing the symplr brand and then the service they provide. So they're only trying to get that unaided recall for one specific brand.
So that's one of the strengths, your ability to build up a single brand into a very strong presence, almost a monolithic presence. There are a couple other strengths that I'd like to highlight. The first is this idea of simplicity. Funny. Did I say that one when I'm talking about symplr? But this idea of simplicity is that whether your name is symplr or not, if you only have one brand management, it is easier. There's maybe one set of templates, one set of brand colors, one brand platform to manage. And so, your ability to deliver on that brand in a consistent way over time becomes much easier. And it also creates less stress and strain on your team to be able to do that. So you get simplicity out of this branded house approach.
The final benefit, I think, is affordability because it's expensive to manage each brand. And if we don't acknowledge that, we're doing ourselves a disservice. But if you can focus on a single brand, it becomes much more affordable. You can spend your money more on amplification of your message, not just doing the baseline to make sure your message exists and is clear.
But there are pitfalls as well. And so, if we think of pitfalls for the branded house, the monolithic brand, like symplr, one is that it can be difficult to differentiate your specific services or sub-brands underneath the monolithic brand. There might be a lack of memorability. So just like it's really easy to say, "Yeah, I use the spend analysis tool by symplr" or "I use symplr's recruiting tool," I might forget that symplr has a recruiting tool or that they have a spend analysis tool because if so much emphasis is placed in the overall parent brand, there's maybe a lack of memorability in this specific service unless they use it every day. So that's a risk or pitfall with this approach.
The second one is it can be difficult to scale for different geographies and audiences. So if you have a very specific audience that you're initially reaching and then you try to sell to another audience, but it's completely different than the initial audience that you were using, then voila, you've come up with a problem, because if people already associate you as serving, say, a health plan audience, and all of a sudden you're trying to serve patients, there's going to be some confusion. And will patients trust you or will they think you're the health plan people? Risk reward here. But that can be one of the challenges.
And then the final risk is that there's an increased risk of cross-brand exposure if something goes wrong. So if maybe symplr spend analysis ... And I'm not saying that this is the case, I'm just using an example. But if symplr spend analysis had some fatal flaw in it and it didn't work or it worked negatively and it impacted people negatively, all of a sudden there's a stain on the symplr brand, not just on spend analysis. And that stain may extend to all the different organizations or all the different ports of that organization. Now, again, to be clear, I'm not saying that this is the case with symplr. I'm just talking about them as an example of a branded house. Their products are respected. They do good work, but that could be any company like them that uses just a single branded house, strong brand identity for one brand. If something goes wrong in one area of their company or of their brand experience, it can extend to every other area without very many buffers.
So despite this, especially for fast-growing companies, for companies that are looking to build their brand in the market, this is typically the recommendation I make, right? Because it is the quickest path to building up and getting known in the market. So that's a branded house.
Let's move on to the next one. And this is called a sub-brand architecture. And it's a little bit about a halfway between the branded house, which we just talked about, and the endorsed brands, which we're going to talk about in a moment. But a sub-brand architecture maintains the overall brand as preeminent, but it creates named sub-brands that give customers the ability to build specific associations and equity with those sub-brands as well. So the classic example, which I already mentioned in the consumer space is Apple. You have the iPhone, MacBook Air, Apple TV, you have the MacBook Pro.
So all of them have their own brand. But if you notice, Apple still reigns preeminent over them. They don't all have their own brand identity, for sure, right? Because they all look, sound ... They don't really smell, but they look, sound, and feel like Apple products or Mac products. And so they have their own identity that they can build. I talk about how I have a MacBook Pro, right? From Apple. I have a connection to owning a MacBook Pro and what it does for me and all those sorts of things, but it's clearly an Apple product from the experience I have with it, to the design, to all those things.
An example of this in the healthcare space is Sword Health. So Sword Health provides solutions for muscle and joint pain, pelvic health conditions, movement health, and more. They help people live better while reducing healthcare costs with mobility tools. And they use a sub-brand approach. So if you look on their website, and I'll put a link to their website in the show notes, you'll see a couple things. First of all, there's a pretty strong brand language when you're on their website. There are visuals. It's like an app-based approach to how you care for MSK [musculoskeletal] conditions.
But if you look at their solutions section on their site, you'll see that they definitely have their own sub-brands. There's Thrive, which is physical therapy at home. There's Bloom, which is pelvic care. There's Move, which is a whole body solution for living pain-free. There's Predict, which is a tool for avoiding costs for unnecessary surgeries. There's Atlas for global access to pain-fighting exercises and education. And then On Call, which is an on-demand clinical pain specialist. And then finally, an academy where you can get resources. And each of these has maybe their own logo. They have their own branded name. And this is, again, very much like what Apple has ... You could say, "Yeah, I use Sword Thrive," or, "I use Sword Atlas." And Atlas stands on its own, but at the same time, it's referenced back to the Sword brand.
And what are the strengths to this approach? Again, this approach benefits from the equity of a strong parent brand, right? So people can get to know the overall parent brand. You can have strong equity. But at the same time, people can build connections with the individual product or service or sub-brand. And then it also allows for separate brand associations where someone could use Atlas and build specific associations around Atlas, specific thoughts about it, specific emotional connections about how they use it, and then have totally different connections to something like Thrive, the physical therapy tool. And it could be about making them feel good, making them feel better, making them have a faster recovery, giving them the tools they need to get better versus if we think about Academy. It might be about, "I get to learn here. My mind gets opened up," all these things. So different associations between the different products all while living within that Sword family that carries a weight with the overall parent brand.
And the final strength of this approach, the sub-brand approach, is it maintains the simplicity of brand structures that only one overall brand needs to be managed despite having different sub-brands within it.
Pitfalls are, I mean, a few just like everything. One is that it can be difficult to build equity in the sub-brands if they're tied too tightly to the parent brand. If they act a little bit too much like part of a branded house versus a sub-brand separately, there's still exposure up to the parent company and back down into the individual sub-brands if something goes wrong. And then the final piece is it leads to challenges if a product brand becomes more important than the overall parent brand. And then you have to come up with some tough decisions. So if Sword's Thrive solution ever became the thing that they were known for most, you might all of a sudden have to have a discussion around, "What do we do with our brand architecture if everyone refers to us as Thrive, not as sword?" So just some other things to consider there. So that's sub-brands. So sub-brands or branded house. Sorry. Already getting ahead of myself. Branded house, one monolithic brand, sub-brand architecture, one where you still have the monolithic brand, but there are individual brands underneath that monolithic brand.
Now, we get to endorsed brands, and this is where we start to, I think, move away from the overall monolithic brand, more to some unique identities. So an endorsed brand architecture is made up of a parent brand, but then there are distinct sub-brands that are intentionally endorsed by that parent brand. So you know that it's owned by the parent brand in order to share that parent brand's equity. But the endorsed brand has a brand identity all of its own.
So a classic example in the consumer space would be Marriott Bonvoy, right? Or any other hotel brand, really. But Marriott is a really good example because they have the overall parent brand, Marriott, and it lends its equity down to the sub-brands, especially those that maybe aren't the premium or flagship brands in their portfolio. So I'm thinking of like SpringHill Suites by Marriott, Courtyard by Marriott, and others like that. So clearly, the Marriott name is in there, but the Courtyard brand exists on its own. It has its own identity. It looks and feels its own way. It may have some inner relationship, but it is a separate brand where people can build separate associations with it.
Now, if we think about the health tech space, this isn't used a ton in health tech. But a close example would be maybe in the hospital and healthcare provider space that we work in often. And I'm thinking of like major health systems. So in our neck of the woods, one of them is Providence. It's a major Catholic health system. And wherever they show up, right? In the Seattle area specifically, they are an endorsing brand to what is Swedish. Providence Swedish is what it's called. And Swedish still has its own brand identity. It shows up in its own standalone way, but Providence is endorsing the brand, if you will.
And if that plays out, you look at Providence's website. There's also numerous other hospital networks that have maintained their own name and their own brand identity, I assume, but still are being endorsed by Providence, just like Providence Swedish is the Swedish Medical Center being endorsed by the overall Providence brand.
So there are benefits to this as well. So one strength of this approach is if this, the Providence brand, is much more well known. It can lend the equity of the parent brand down into the endorsed brand or to the smaller brand where you have Providence lending its brand equity to the Swedish Medical Center brand. It also allows for a separate brand identity and strategy for the sub-brand. So I talked about this briefly about Swedish Medical Center. When you land on their website, it still is very much a Swedish Medical Center website and Swedish Health Centers. And this allows them to have the ability to market themselves separately, to stand alone in how they show up, to maintain the brand equity that they've already built up in the community. This could be a really relevant strategy for someone who's in high acquisition mode or who's going through mergers and acquisitions where you're leveraging key parts of the Providence brand, the parent brand. But Swedish also is maintaining its own brand to maintain the connection it has in the community, etc.
So the other piece that is a real strength of the endorsed brand set up or architecture is that it provides insulation if there's an issue with a sub-brand. So if something goes wrong, the negative impacts can be limited to that specific sub-brand perhaps and maybe not flow up to all of the sub-brands or the endorsed brands within the architecture.
But what are the pitfalls? One pitfall is it can be difficult to manage cleanly. There's always a temptation when you have an endorsed brand strategy to move to a house of brands strategy or to move closer to a branded house. Now, I think this often becomes the hybrid strategy because you look at ... We talked about Marriott a little bit earlier here. They do have standalone brands that aren't really marketed as Marriott brands. They also have endorsed brands. They also have their parent brand that owns hotels. And so this can be difficult to manage cleanly and keep clean. There's also exposure up to the parent company and back down if there is an issue. So it's not like it's completely insulated. And it can really lead to complexity in management and difficulty maintaining standards across all the different brands. If you're managing 10, 15 different brands that are endorsed by a parent company, it can be really challenging to keep the same quality across all of them.
So we've talked about three brand architecture frameworks so far. First being the branded house, second, sub-brands, third, endorsed brands. The most radical one, and I think one we often don't think about too much, but it is all over the place in our day-to-day life, is this idea of house of brands. And this is where there's an overall parent brand, but each individual brand has its own distinct brand identity, and you get to know each of those distinct brands independently. And most equity in the brand is tied up in that individual child brand. And if you didn't look on the back or look into it deeply, you wouldn't know that that child brand was related to the parent brand.
A classic example of this, and the reason I said on the back when I started thinking about this is look at your shampoo box or your shampoo bottle next time you're washing your hair in the shower. And I bet if you flip it around to the back, you'll see that it's either a Unilever or a Procter & Gamble product. But because these brands take a house of brands approach, you'd never see Unilever or Procter & Gamble on the front of the shampoo bottle. It's not marketed as such, etc. It's just the parent that's sitting on the back that is there because it's legally one of their brands, but it isn't something that they're trying to really advertise.
And so classic examples of this in the healthcare space are pharmaceutical brands, which build up very strong brands around each individual therapy that they develop or each drug that they develop. And there may be some mention of AbbVie or whatever the specific pharmaceutical brand or company that could develop them in their ads, but everything is about the specific brand around the treatment.
But another example, if you're not in pharmaceuticals, which we don't work in that too much, would be in a company that we've worked with extensively. It's called apree health. And they have two brands that stand alone on their own. One is Vera Whole Health that provides advanced primary care and one's Castlight Health that provides care navigation. And these two brands can be sold independently. They obviously can offer their services across to each other. Vera customers can use the Castlight Health digital navigation solution, but they stand on their own, right?
In the market, you don't have to know Castlight to buy Vera. You don't have to know apree health to buy Vera. You buy Vera because of their advanced primary care services. And similar with Castlight. You can buy Castlight care navigation regardless of who does your primary care or if you have a primary care solution. And in each of these instances, as they're out in the market, they show up as Vera or Castlight, not as apree health, even though that's the parent brand that sits behind them, and if you look on their websites, right? The parent company notes that Vera and Castlight are their brands that do these specific things. But in practice in the markets, they stand alone.
So that's an example. And I think that can often be the case with a private equity solution, right? As they're maybe grabbing up a group of brands to use. They will deploy them together because they have complimentary services, but they will also want to not shake up the fact that they can be sold separately. And so they'll keep them separate from the way they show up into the marketplace with customers.
So some strengths here are that it allows for each of the various brands to cultivate distinct audiences. It also allows for each of the brands to have distinct services that can be really different. It allows for each brand to have a unique identity and build unique equity. And it insulates each brand nearly completely or as much as possible from the challenges related to other brands that might come up.
The pitfalls are that it can be more difficult to upsell and cross-sell. And now, I don't think this is as big a difference if you a have sales team and you are like, "Hey, I'm selling this advanced primary care thing. Our parent company also has care navigation. It's under this brand. We recommend you buy them together." That makes a lot of sense, right? But the upsell and cross-sell still requires some explanation. A pitfall is that there's not really much of a connection with the parent brand. If the parent brand has a lot of equity, there's no way to transfer that equity down into the sub-brands that are their own brands.
And I think the biggest pitfall here, is that it requires a budget to really manage this. Each new brand has to work from scratch to develop equity. So I think this is something that as people acquire different solutions or different brands, they can move into this position because the brands are already established, there's already brand equity, but it's rare for someone to start from scratch and say, "I'm going to build a house of brands," because it's so much to start from scratch for each individual brand versus if you're starting out with three or four existing brands that you're combining together. It might make sense to leave them as a house of brands with each of them separate.
So those are the four main brand architecture frameworks. Again, the branded house, sub-brand architecture, the endorsed brand architecture, and the house of brands. If you haven't thought about this for your organization, I really encourage you to think about this. And if you're like, "Well, I don't have multiple brands," I would encourage you to think about this from a solution or a product perspective, right? Because it's really important to think about the architecture of how your products are known in the marketplace and how they show up. And you can decide whether they just remain products, right? Or if they need to have their own specific sub-brands that are still part of the main brand or if they need to become their own separate brand. Endorsed brands are a part of a house of brands. There are decisions. And I think the key thing here is to make sure you make a decision intentionally.
So if you're asking, "Great. This is good information. When should I actually think about this?" I think there's really three ideal times to work on your brand architecture. One is during mergers and acquisitions. It's always good, I think essential, during that time to think about how do these things fit together and how do we make sure that they are going to fit together in a way that's going to make sense to our customers. You do this during a rebrand as well as you are thinking about what makes your organization unique. I think you should think about, "How can we uniquely make it all fit together operationally?" And then as there are major organizational shifts, maybe you're changing your audience you're going after, maybe you're doing something else, that's the other time to think about your brand architecture.
But I'd encourage you, as you are embarking upon this, if you're embarking on a project like this or you just finished working on your brand architecture, don't set it or forget it. You need to always be actively thinking about how your brands interrelate, the value they can bring to each other, and more. And you need to manage that portfolio actively. And I think that's where David Aaker's brand portfolio strategy is a really useful tool to check into and think about. And I would also say don't make changes too often. You're going to confuse your customers. It's important to choose a course and follow through with it and then watch the data, watch how things are going so that you can build an architecture and maintain an architecture that makes sense, and it's going to help you grow.
So with that, I'll wrap it up today. I hope you found this helpful. I hope you find the world of brand architecture to be fascinating. I think it's one of the most exciting places within the branding discipline because it allows you to really architect what the experience is going to be for your organization when people interact with it. And if you have any other questions or want to talk more about it, I'd encourage you to reach out. I'd love to have conversations with you. And with that, I'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand and marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a brand and marketing agency in Seattle, Washington. Our producer is Rob Gregerson of Legato Productions.