From theory to reality: How to stress-test your new Brand Architecture

VIEW THE FULL BRAND ARCHITECTURE SERIES

Crafting a brand architecture for your business begins as a conceptual activity. It involves creating different structures, categorizations, and levels on paper. But what happens when it’s time to put your newly formed brand architecture into practice? Before bringing everything to life, there’s one more intermediate step that’s critical to ensuring your architecture’s success.

“Stress-testing” your prototype from both a visual and operational perspective before putting it into action allows you to achieve three essential goals:

1. It helps you seamlessly build a bridge from the strategic brainstorming phase to the actual execution

2. It brings your stakeholders along for the ride, allowing you to avoid any surprises down the line

3. It ensures your architecture is viable for the long term.

Visual testing

It’s one thing for brand architecture to exist as an abstract diagram in a PowerPoint presentation. But oftentimes, it can be challenging to translate these architectural ideas into tangible implications.

That’s where visual testing come in. Developing mock-ups of your brand architecture—or, better yet, applying the architecture to select real-world examples—enables you to better evaluate how your architecture would actually work across a range of scenarios.

Key touchpoints to consider

To determine the best touchpoints for visual testing, start by getting a gut check from your various teams. For example, if you’re a consulting company, you may want to speak with individuals in sales to better understand what collateral they’re sharing in their pitches, HR leaders to see how your brand is showing up to current employees and prospective hires, and even customers to see where and how they’re interacting with your brand on a daily basis. Whereas health systems put an emphasis on signage given the importance of the physical care locations.

Here are some of the main mediums you’ll want create mock-ups for:

Website

Within your website, it’s important to map your brand architecture across multiple user journeys. If your architecture includes sub-brands, for example, will users be redirected to external sites when exploring those entities? Or will your sub-brands have separate pages on the same site that feel aesthetically different (or the same)? These types of questions will help determine the relationship between all the tiers of your portfolio.

Signage

For companies with a physical footprint, brand architecture also needs to shine through at these locations—and that starts with signage. For example, if you’re maintaining your enterprise brand logo but updating your sub-brand logos, how would that impact locations? Or perhaps you simply need to add an endorsement line to a pre-existing logo. Where would that need to be implemented in your offices? If you have a remote treatment, how would this show up in signage, if at all? And showing how you can leverage primary building signage vs front door signage can be critical to ensure understanding and buy-in. 

Collateral

From packaging to sales decks and everything in between, it’s crucial to think through how your brand architecture will show up in these external contexts. For example, showing what an enterprise-level brochure would look like compared to an offering-level brochure. Playing out how the architecture is applied on covers vs inside-spreads vs back page adds a degree of tangibility that can’t be shown in a PowerPoint framework and ensures you have thought through implications. Even if you have a unified architecture, it is important to show how you would treat offering names. Consider running these visuals by the sales team, as often they rely on collateral to support their sales approach, and if they are happy it can go a long way with leadership.

Uniforms

Look good, feel good, “brand” good. Uniforms for your workforce may or may not need to be updated depending on your brand architecture. Not only is it a point of pride and excitement, but in some industries this might be an important touchpoint to think through. This is usually more common in industries like healthcare, where it’s necessary to distinguish between the larger enterprise and any sub-brands that employ staff.

Internal applications

Where does your existing brand show up in your internal communications and environments? From email signatures to branded PowerPoint templates to employee badges and office spaces, making mock-ups of these assets ensures everyone is aligned on how they should reflect the new brand architecture. This also helps in building excitement for internal teams, and well as demonstrate potential impacts on culture, whether reinforcing divisions or breaking down silos. 

Digital

Digital platforms are typically some of the easiest places to update your brand architecture, since, in these cases, physical production isn’t required to change anything. But as simple as they are to evolve, they can be tricky to navigate internally. Often individual teams, entities, sub-brands, etc. feel they need their own digital and social presence, but how would your architecture strategy impact this? From your LinkedIn bio to your Instagram profile visuals to any and all posts, creating mock-ups of digital deliverables that reflect your new brand architecture is a good way to get a sense of how you’ll need to show up in the future across various digital platforms.

Ultimately, the goal of visualizing the architecture is to ensure understanding and increase buy-in. Seeing your brand architecture in action can help ease any qualms from leadership, strengthen alignment, and cultivate excitement among team members who may have expressed reservation earlier. Plus, this visual pressure-testing will empower you to move quickly once you receive the “okay” to move forward.

Operational testing

Organizational considerations

Brand architecture testing isn’t just a visual exercise. Many times, architectural shifts can impact your organization’s core structure—so testing on this front is absolutely essential, as well. To kick off this process, ask yourself the following:

• Will the new architecture affect my business’s teams or leaders?
  If you’re unifying or separating products and services externally, those changes should usually occur internally, as well. For instance, if you are reorganizing from individual offerings to integrated solutions, how does that impact your internal structure? Sometimes it doesn’t have to. But in other cases, you need to consider leadership, team structures, etc. in order to truly deliver on the strategy. 
• Will the new architecture impact my business’s go-to-market strategy?
  Brand architecture influences the manner in which an enterprise communicates its offerings. Take a consulting company that is shifting from a capabilities organizational model to one driven by industry expertise. This shift should influence how you go to market, your content strategy, how you advertise, etc.
• Will the new architecture require updates to our customer experience or service delivery?
  Brand architecture can also shape the way customers interact with your brand. For example, consider a tech company moving from selling individual software solutions to an integrated platform. This not only changes how people buy, but also requires a more integrated user experience and customer service teams that can speak to a broader range of issues and opportunities.

Product and service considerations

As you continue to evolve your brand architecture, make sure to anticipate how it will change the way your products and services interact with one another. The new architecture model might reveal potential gaps or weaknesses in your product portfolio, or on the other side overlaps that can be rationalized. This could reveal that weaknesses in the portfolio might make your architecture strategy less implementable, at least short term. Also consider how your architecture strategy enables key goals like cross-selling, bundling, or even repositioning offerings.

Cultural considerations

Finally, before embracing a new brand architecture, make sure to keep in mind possible cultural ramifications. If, for example, the brand architecture initiative is focused on bringing disparate sub-brands together under a single roof, it will be equally important to harness that same spirit of unification internally, too. You’ll need a strategy to encourage your workforce to view themselves as part of the enterprise brand, instead of their original departments—and establish trainings, team bonding events, and more to help foster this new mentality. Always connect your architecture strategy to internal goals as well as external objectives.

The best ways to stress test

So far, we’ve discussed what to do to bring the architecture to life. Now, it’s time to talk more about how to do it. Here are three tips that will enable you to successfully “play out” your brand architecture prototypes—and triple check that they’re right for your business before full-scale adoption.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Every brand architecture “test” should involve a multidisciplinary team. Start by planning a collaborative work session and make sure that someone from every discipline within your company is represented—from marketing to operations to IT. Having a plethora of perspectives when you’re evaluating a possible brand architecture lets you avoid blind spots—and helps you see how your system will impact the organization at large.

Get hypothetical

As mentioned in previous sections, the best way to test a theory is to scenario plan using specific circumstances. And don’t forget to consider best practices from other brands, as well. Let’s say your brand architecture involves expanding your portfolio. What does that really look like? What if you launch a new product line that is outside of your core? Are there any potential acquisitions that could change the dynamic of your story and architecture? Are there any policy decisions in plan that might shift the direction of your company? Talking through each route and potential future scenarios will help you dive further into the nitty gritty and better understand the investment required—and helping you future-proof your strategy.

Start with a soft launch

Bringing your brand architecture to the world can sometimes be a big step. If your future state requires significant change, you can start small—especially when the transition is more of a planned migration. Consider “piloting” the brand architecture by rolling it out within a single area of your business, such as across a particular sub-brand or market. This allows you to leverage feedback and user data to improve the experience during its wider launch. This approach lets you iron out any issues while the stakes are still low—and even enhance your architecture before fully committing to it.

From gut check to green light

Both visual and operational testing are integral parts of creating a brand architecture. These steps will help you get ahead of potential challenges and, simultaneously, generate buy-in and confidence in your chosen direction. But, most importantly, this testing ensures that your system can hold up for the long-term—transforming theory into reality.

Interested in learning more about how your organization can benefit from brand architecture? Reach out to us.