2.3
Brand Architecture
The decision about how many brands a company runs and how they relate: one master brand, a house of separate brands, or a structure between the two.
David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler (2000), building on Aaker's brand portfolio work
What it does
Makes the cost of a new name explicit. Every separate brand needs its own memory structures built from zero, and every extension of an existing brand spends memory structures that already exist. The frame forces a company to say which it is doing and to price the choice rather than drifting into a portfolio nobody decided on.
When it breaks
It gives no rule for where the line falls. The frame will describe any portfolio you already have and endorse almost any addition to it, because the case for a master brand (efficiency) and the case for a separate brand (focus) are both always available. The evidence on extensions is conditional. Similarity between the extension and the parent matters, and so does the strength of the parent. A frame that does not carry those conditions is a vocabulary, not a decision rule.
Case
Dacin and Smith's work in the Journal of Marketing Research found that consumer evaluations of a brand extension depend on the characteristics of the existing portfolio, in particular the consistency of quality across it, rather than on the extension in isolation. That is what a purely structural architecture diagram leaves out.
Dacin & Smith · The Effect of Brand Portfolio Characteristics on Consumer Evaluations of Brand Extensions, JMR ↗In the wild
Unchecked · not part of the tier
What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.
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