Anchor your Brand Architecture on a multi-faceted framework
Brand Architecture series: Part 7

VIEW THE FULL BRAND ARCHITECTURE SERIES
Brand architecture is the foundation around which you build your offerings—a blueprint that determines how your brand appears to customers and goes to market. And as a concept, brand architecture also has its own four-element foundation, built around organizing principles, portfolio strategies, hierarchy, and nomenclature. By considering these factors together, practitioners can build the best brand architecture frameworks for their business.
Organizing Principle
An organizing principle is the way in which you organize and present your portfolio, providing a “way in” for your customers. It aligns your brand architecture to your brand story—reinforcing the narrative you want customers to hear.
Typically, organizing principles are based on themes that align with this narrative. For instance, if your brand positioning focuses on your process as a differentiator, your organizing principle might hinge on the steps in your process (e.g., Discover, Design, Build, Implement). If your business’s unique breadth of offerings is what you want to promote instead, a brand architecture built around those product categories might make the most sense.
Usually, these themes fall into one of five familiar categories:
- Who: By audience (e.g., retailers who organize by men, women, kids, everyone, etc.)
- What: By product category (e.g., tech companies who split their offerings into hardware, software, accessories, etc.)
- Where: By geography or location (e.g., manufacturing companies that organize based on where they have facilities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.)
- How: By processes or tasks (e.g., a marketing software company that asks whether its customers want to “operate,” “sell,” or “market”)
- Why: By benefit (e.g., a kitchenware company that organizes products around advantages like “space-saving,” “easy to clean,” and “eco-friendly”)
At the end of the day, there’s no one-size-fits all organizing principle. But keep in mind, a successful one should be broad enough to house all your offerings under its umbrella. We like to say it should be exhaustive but doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. A flexible organizing principle—in which you can position an offering across multiple categories—is also ideal because it gives you the opportunity to align with how different audiences want to engage with your portfolio. Also, keep in mind that how you organize can have a significant impact on your ability to cross-sell—this is an opportunity to break down traditional siloed ways of thinking to encourage customers to think differently, and more broadly.
So, how can you make sure you land on the right organizing principle? Internal brainstorming and discussion are a good starting point. But make sure to explore broadly—don’t simply pick the first one you land on. Instead, thoroughly explore multiple options and conduct a process of elimination. And try to think beyond functional categories like the “what.” Make sure to consider all the alternatives—even if a functional “way in” ends up being best. Looking at all the possibilities, even the wrong ones, can help you ensure that you’ll end up with the best option.
If you have more time and a bigger budget, looking outside the walls of your company and initiating external research on organizing principles can be a helpful additional step. Consider conducting research with customers, often done using a card sorting exercise. First, provide them with a deck that lists all your products or offerings on separate cards, and ask them to sort these into categories. Then, in follow up groups, reverse the process by providing categories and asking your customers to match your products to these groups. These research sessions will help you uncover insights into the way your customers think and operate. And they’ll also allow you to test out your own hypotheses about which routes are most effective. Plus, they’ll give you real data, so you can feel confident in your final decision. For example, maybe one organizing principle is easier to navigate, but another creates a stronger association with your brand story. Having real reactions to both can help you generate buy-in among your own team for whichever option you go with. Cost and time efficient ways are to test this internally are with your own team, especially sales, service, and product leads.
Some other key questions to ask throughout this exercise could include:
- How do our customers buy?
- What mindset do they have when they start their journey to buy what we offer?
- How would customers complete the phrase “I need a ______”?
Portfolio Strategy
Portfolio strategy defines the relationship between the many offerings in your portfolio—and helps you decide when and how to create new brands. Most people think of portfolio strategy as a dichotomy, with a “branded house” model on one side (where all products are aligned under a single parent brand) and a “house of brands” model on the other (where all products and services receive their own unique branding).
In reality, most models are a hybrid, falling somewhere in between these two ends of the spectrum—and, as organizations grow bigger and more complex, it’s rarely as simple as applying a single model monolithically.
Take Marriott, for instance, which has an entire portfolio of Marriott-branded hotels but also a number of independently branded accommodations focused on luxury experiences and longer stays. Both of these groups coexist side-by-side under the Marriott International umbrella.
GE, too—another company that’s often thought of as a strong “branded house”—adopted an innovative approach earlier this year. Instead of the one enterprise brand it used to be, GE has now split into three standalone publicly traded companies: GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, and GE HealthCare. And if you look further into the HealthCare portfolio, you’ll notice that, while the portfolio strategy generally follows a unified branded house approach from a visual standpoint, they allow flexibility for product family names, like “Revolution CT” rather than a purely descriptive name.
While it’s not always so black and white, there are still some general best use cases for each of these models, which we’ll dive into below:
House of Brands
This approach is more common for consumer companies (think: Unilever and P&G). In these cases, the parent brand may need to execute a hyper-targeted selling approach to appeal to specific audience needs—and this can be more easily achieved when specific products can be branded separately from others in the portfolio. This tactic also allows companies to maintain more “shelf space” and real estate in a particular industry (by bringing seemingly different brands to market, side by side). However, keep in mind that each brand in a portfolio will require time and resources to grow, so a house of brands is a more expensive model to employ.
Branded House
This approach is more commonly used across companies that sell solutions and services. In these cases, a bigger-picture brand story can carry real value. Consider the healthcare industry: Healthcare systems often provide a wide range services across everything from cardiology to oncology to gastroenterology. But while these are all unique specialties, it still often makes sense to go to market as a single parent brand that communicates the quality of care across all areas—like Mount Sinai, the Mayo Clinic, Northwell, and more. A shared story can not only communicate excellence and performance, but also make patients feel like they’ll have a more seamless and integrated care experience.
While this model is more efficient to manage, it can be difficult to implement consistently. A branded house requires significant internal discipline to follow, especially when launching or acquiring a new set of services or products.
As your portfolio expands, a general rule for when it makes sense to create a new brand is if the value proposition of the new offering is significantly different from your current one. For example, even though both live under the Marriott brand, the Ritz Carlton and Fairfield Inn by Marriot create entirely different expectations around luxury—and that distinction justifies maintaining both as separate brands, instead of leading with the Marriott name across all.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy is the different and distinct levels of your portfolio. It lets you prioritize, ensuring that your most strategic, higher-value offerings receive more visibility. And alongside your portfolio strategy, which highlights breadth, hierarchy works as a vertical axis—revealing the full depth of your offering to customers.
Each level of your hierarchy will ultimately guide how you treat the offerings that live within them, both visually and verbally. A typical hierarchy often leads with the enterprise brand and cascades all the way down through solutions, product families, and product features. Higher-level offerings (like your overarching brand and solutions) may lean more heavily into suggestive naming and expressive visuals to help them feel prominent. On the other hand, lower-level offerings like individual products and features might include more descriptive language and straightforward visuals—ensuring they’re clear and communicative, but don’t steal the spotlight from more strategic offerings and the main story you’re trying to tell.
In general, each level of a hierarchy should be treated differently, but how you achieve that is up to you. Whether it’s through graphic treatments, iconography, type size and style, or nomenclature, keeping each “layer” distinct is essential for a clear, effective hierarchy.
Let’s look at our client, VCU Health, for some added insight. Before we partnered with them, VCU Health didn’t have a formal hierarchy within their brand architecture. At the time, they were positioning their medical group—one of their largest businesses that generates significant revenue—at the same level as the real estate department and the university side, which was notably smaller with a team of three professors. Both groups received the same visual treatment in their portfolio, even though one was a high-revenue generating business with a broad consumer audience—making navigation less intuitive for customers. A strong, sensible hierarchy, however, could have helped avoid some of these pitfalls.
Nomenclature
Nomenclature determines how you name various offerings across your portfolio. While it’s the fourth and final component of brand architecture, it in no way should be an afterthought. The verbal systems you use to refer to your products must be well thought-through, so they can easily communicate prominence across and relationships between parts of your portfolio.
Traditionally, descriptive names are employed more frequently in B2B landscapes, bringing clarity to large and complex portfolios. Oftentimes, B2B brands will name marquee products more evocatively, while giving other lower-level products more straightforward monikers. This is because evocative names tend to be more memorable and exciting—helping the products attached to them stand out and be more visible. Consider IBM, who traditionally uses descriptive names but used the name Watson to highlight their data and AI platform, which is key to positioning their entire company.
Conversely, consumer product portfolios usually allow for more flexibility in naming—ranging from descriptive to suggestive to abstract. Liquid Death is a fitting example of a company that has created a highly compelling naming system based on its overarching brand name. Flavors like “Cherry Obituary,” “Grave Fruit,” and “Berry It Alive” all connect back to “Death.”
Beyond helping customers navigate your portfolio and bringing attention to specific products, nomenclature is also essential for establishing relationships between products. Auto manufacturers, for instance, will use naming systems (like sport, EX-L, Touring, etc.) to distinguish between different “tiers” of cars within the same model. This system tells buyers that these cars are part of the same family but easily indicates different price points and features.
Research is best to determine perceptions and associations with names, but that can be expensive if you have a huge portfolio. Otherwise, you need to spend the time, energy, and financial resources to make sure audiences know what you mean. This is why we recommend being descriptive when possible. It can be useful to leverage more proprietary names, but it must be strategic. Each name requires time and investment to make it work.
Finally, nomenclature signals innovation. Many brands use numerical systems, as well as themed naming conventions, to represent various versions of their products. One that does both is Apple. It uses numbers to highlight incremental improvements (like the iPhone 14 to the iPhone 15) and has used more proprietary naming themes for more revolutionary changes, like new iterations of its operating system (Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia, etc.).
Brand architecture helps support your business by creating clarity around your offerings and what you do. But it’s not just about streamlining and simplifying. It’s also about telling a compelling story that aligns with your brand and creating an experience when navigating your portfolio. In this regard, brand architecture is one of the most tangible tools in your arsenal to get customers to choose you. And when employed across these four dimensions—organizing principle, portfolio strategy, hierarchy, and nomenclature—you’ll set your organization up for success.
Once you’ve mastered these strategic aspects of your brand architecture framework, it’ll be time to bring it to life visually. So, stay tuned: we’ll offer insights and recommendations on this topic in our next installment of the series.
