Best Practices: Using Brand Architecture Research to Drive Engagement

Strategically Optimizing Your Brand Portfolio for Maximum Impact on Performance

Too often in the marketplace brands accumulate, not linking to an overall identity.  In cases where brands are not cohesively connected, marketing strategies are typically less efficient and less effective. Consumers are either unaware of, or confused by, the full brand portfolio.

Brand Architecture is the way brands within a company’s portfolio are related to, and differentiated from, one another. At its best, the architecture should define:

• The different layers of branding within an organization,
• How corporate and product-brands relate to and support one another,
• How the product-brands reflect or reinforce the core purpose of the corporate brand to which they belong.

Brand Architecture research is essential to ensuring a healthy, meaningful overall portfolio. It uncovers and maps out the ways an organization can leverage perceived relationships and equities across its sub-brands and overall corporate brand.

Ultimately, it helps brands achieve the overall goal that every organization wants: building a brand eco-system that leads to deeper engagement with the target audience.

How do we achieve this goal? We benchmark perceptions of the current brand architecture and evaluate the impact of potential alternative architecture solutions. This happens by focusing on four core areas:

1.  The imagery of the corporate brand, its product-brands, and the key competitive brands in the category, both corporate and product
2.  The ways in which customers and prospects perceptually classify these various product-brands
3.  The role of brand in the purchase decision-making process and how customers and prospects navigate through brand consideration and selection
4.  The areas where corporate and product branding can best deliver an optimal identity

Various inputs can define a brand. To most advantageously optimize brand architecture, we recommend utilizing an advanced form of choice-based research: Menu-Based Choice (MBC)

We recommend MBC because it is:

• Flexible in how we present stimuli. Often, we create a purchasing experience that is reflective of a consumer’s typical experience.
• Able to take on multiple layers of inputs, including variations on price, product imagery, logos and messaging.
  • MBC allows us to showcase various brand options on a screen, framing consumer reactions via their decision-making.
• Highly customizable. The exercise is geared towards presenting consumers with various brand architectures.
  • We can test a broad range of potential architectures, including the current architecture as a benchmark.
• Actionable. Typically, we’re asking consumers to make product selections, as they would in a normal purchase pathway, selecting the items they want to buy. This allows the architecture structure to be judged by its revenue impact.

Ultimately, our approach produces results that allow you to:

• Present an architecture that resonates with consumers
• Drive a deeper consumer relationship, inspiring greater revenue
• Optimize your offering and reduce costs

Please contact us to learn how Brand Architecture can help you deepen engagement with your portfolio.