Scale and grow with brand architecture
Complexity is part of any organism that needs to grow. Systems with their own functions interconnect to work in an organized way and allow life to follow its course—a reality of wise nature that we can extrapolate to organizations: once they reach a certain level, they need order to be effective. The same applies to businesses and, closely tied to all of this, to brands.
Today we're talking about the importance of creating a system that brings order and effectiveness to the different elements that make up our brands. This way, we'll manage to organize a structure that allows us to scale and grow in an almost organic way.
We're going to dive into the world of Brand Architecture, a growth lever for digital businesses. And we start by immersing ourselves in understanding the concept.
Brand Architecture is a functional tool—it can take the form of a diagram in Figma, for example—that reflects the system of roles and relationships that exist between the elements of our brand.
It's fundamental for projecting, designing, and guiding the growth of a brand and its business, but it's not only necessary when we're talking about large groups that have other brands within them. Do you have a digital school? Is your business in services? Are you looking to test different value propositions in the market agilely? While the first thing that comes to mind when talking about architecture is the system between brands, it's also very useful and necessary to help us organize our services or products.
The ideal model for growth
The most orthodox version of Brand Architecture talks about three main models of structures (monolithic, endorsement, or house of independent brands) and all of them can be valid for growth.
The difficult decision is choosing which one is going to catalyze your brand's growth. In fact, nowadays, the heterogeneity of business models and realities in the digital sector market means these classical patterns serve as a starting point that helps us understand what possibilities exist. But the architecture of digital brands needs structures ad hoc as a hybrid result of all the above.
These models must guarantee the solidity and flexibility of the system. Though it sounds utopian, market reality demands we be increasingly precise in our investments and moves and more agile in our adaptations. That's why we need to define what structure can help us consolidate and capitalize on everything we're investing in it—whether through synergies or reputation. That minimizes the risks of missteps from lost engagement or audience trust.
Is your brand limited?
A common situation after a phase of organic growth is discovering that product brands, service brands, or personal brands find their potential has limits or barriers. And it makes sense: they were born in a very specific context, often as a response to something concrete. For example, launching a brand with the name of one of the products and finding that prevents you from diversifying your offer, or with the founder's name and realizing that works against the project's scalability.
rebranding and/or rethinking the brand architecture are usually good solutions in these cases, as long as they're undertaken from the perspective of making strategic decisions, many of them invisible to audiences.
Decisions for coherence
One of the key elements for a brand's success and consistency is its ability to develop its actions and launch its messages in a way that generates a coherent discourse and, therefore, offers trust, improves its reputation, gains traction in positioning…
What matters just as much is what you keep inside what the brand is, as what you leave out. Brand Architecture helps you make those decisions and see whether what we're leaving out makes sense to shape another brand and how it will relate to the first one. At this point, the goal of brand architecture is to reduce noise, to ensure that the messages we care about come through clearly.
The segments
Mi Tienda de Arte is an example of this exercise in strategic order. A brand that was born in León, with a small fine arts store, and that grew to generate 25 million euros in annual revenue. In their case, when they were already in full swing of their international growth with the sister brand Craftelier, they realized there was something they couldn't identify that was holding back their growth. Should we create a brand per country?, they wondered.
After studying their brand architecture and audiences, we discovered that international growth didn't come from changing the brand name according to the country where it sold, but from being more radical in seeking the match with the audiences they were reaching and creating other niche brands that were equally radical. That decision led to the rebranding of Mi Tienda de Arte to be Craftelier in all markets and the creation of Hartem, specialized in Fine Arts.
More impact with less effort
Another key to brand architecture is leveraging the synergies that make day-to-day operations simpler, avoiding duplications, capitalizing on already fertile ground, and building reputation across brands.
This means that often, when working with different brands for different services, you opt for a brand endorsement approach or less obvious corporate organizational lines for the user, so that the reputation of one service and the trust it generates can improve cross-selling, as happened in the case of Cuervá.
There are times when to achieve strong returns, the strategic thinking is ambitious yet requires only a few brushstrokes to execute. This happened to us at DevExpert when we helped them organize their products and training programs into different groups—each with its own identifier—depending on the level of engagement required from participants.
Thinking from the business side
In the digital sector, things move fast. Launch, test, iterate, relaunch. And this is where another major advantage of brand architecture comes into play: systematization. Having zero doubts about how the brands we launch should be—they'll all carry the parent brand name upfront, for example—cuts down time and headaches. Creating a Minimum Viable Brand becomes much simpler.
In cases of brand purchases or acquisitions by corporate groups, architecture will also be fundamental in deciding what relationship exists between those two brands and what they share. And especially critical if part of what the group has acquired is the brand equity of the acquired brand. Without a clear relationship, the value that has cost the brand so much to build can be lost in a matter of months.
Order makes the complex simple
If you're now thinking, but how do we do this? At Soluble, we approach architecture exercises starting from reliable and as unbiased as possible knowledge of internal and external reality. The brand's strategy must be refined and up to date, both representing the brand's strengths and understanding its business objectives.
This, combined with the perspective that our audiences and the market in which the brand operates give us, will provide us with the pieces we need to make the decisions that will shape our architecture system.
