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, and the strength of the parent, both matter — so 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, which is what a purely structural architecture diagram leaves out.
Dacin & Smith — The Effect of Brand Portfolio Characteristics on Consumer Evaluations of Brand Extensions, JMR ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
A master brand and a house of brands drawn side by side with the same total sales, but the memory structures drawn as accumulated mass under each name — one deep pool, several shallow ones, total area equal and the depth doing the work.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
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