What brand architecture is, and what it decides

Brand architecture is the set of decisions about how the things a company sells relate to each other and to the company itself. Any business with a second product has one. It decides what a new product is called, whether it carries the parent's name, whose reputation takes the damage when something goes wrong, and what happens to a rival's name after you buy the rival. Few companies choose it on purpose. Most name things one product at a time, and find out years later that the names add up to a structure nobody decided on.

The standard map comes from David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler, who set it out in the California Management Review in 2000 and called it the brand relationship spectrum. At one end sits the branded house, where one master brand goes on everything and each product is named as a version of it. At the other end sits the house of brands, where every product has a name of its own and the parent stays out of sight. Between them are endorsed brands, which have their own name with the parent's signature underneath, and sub-brands, which only make sense next to the parent's name. Real companies sit all along the line.

FedEx is the clean example of a branded house. In January 2000 the holding company, then called FDX Corporation, renamed itself FedEx Corporation, and two weeks later its ground parcel business RPS became FedEx Ground and Roberts Express became FedEx Custom Critical. One name now went on every truck, plane and uniform. Google names most of its products the same way, as Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Translate. The logic is cost. Each launch borrows the awareness the master brand has already paid for, so a new service starts life known.

Unilever and Procter & Gamble are the textbook houses of brands. A shopper can buy Dove soap and Hellmann's mayonnaise for years without learning that one company makes both, and Unilever is content with that. The separation pays off when a business is sold. In December 2017 Unilever agreed to sell its spreads business, including Flora, Rama and Blue Band, to the investment firm KKR for almost seven billion euros, and the brands could leave cleanly because nobody had been taught that Flora meant Unilever. That freedom has a price. Each of those brands had to build its own fame from nothing, and each keeps paying to hold on to it.

Most large companies are hybrids. The hard decisions sit in the middle of the spectrum. Marriott puts its own name under Courtyard, so the cheaper hotel borrows trust without being mistaken for the flagship. When Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover from Ford in 2008, it left the Tata name off the cars, since people buying a Jaguar or a Range Rover are paying for those names and a new owner's name would add nothing to them. In August 2015 Google reorganised the other way round and put a new parent, Alphabet, above itself, so the search business kept the Google name while ventures far from search, such as Calico's work on ageing, sat beside it under names of their own. Larry Page wrote that the aim was a company that was cleaner and more accountable.

For a designer, this is the decision that sets the size of the job. A branded house needs one identity system that can stretch to forty product names without breaking, which means firm rules for how a product name sits beside the master mark. A house of brands needs forty identities, forty sets of guidelines and forty budgets. An endorsed structure needs a rule for how loud the parent is, anywhere between a small line on the back of a pack and equal billing on the front. A logo cannot settle any of it. A studio that starts drawing before the architecture is agreed usually ends up drawing everything twice.