Branding.

The framework

1. 01

   Map where brand equity currently lives.

   Before designing an architecture, assess where equity is concentrated. Does your customer trust the company name or the product name? A B2B company where enterprise buyers trust the parent brand is primed for a monolithic approach. A consumer company where customers barely know the parent exists is often running an accidental house of brands.

2. 02

   Decide whether new products borrow or build equity.

   A new product launch is a decision: does this product borrow equity from the parent brand (faster launch, lower CAC, higher risk to parent if it fails) or build its own equity from scratch (slower, more expensive, but contained if it fails)? The answer depends on how different the new product's audience and risk profile are from the core. Borrowing is efficient until it isn't.

3. 03

   Audit for architecture drift.

   Most brand portfolios aren't designed — they accumulate. A product gets named opportunistically. An acquisition keeps its brand. A feature gets a sub-brand because a marketing manager liked the name. The result is a portfolio that confuses buyers and fragments equity. Every two years, draw the architecture on one page and ask: does this make sense to a new customer?

4. 04

   Protect the master brand from the extension risk.

   The failure mode of monolithic architecture is brand extension into a category that damages the parent's core associations. Virgin's financial services undermined the core brand's irreverence. Google+ cost the Google brand credibility in social. The test before every extension: if this product fails publicly, what does it say about everything else under the same name?