MESSY BRAND ARCHITECTURE IS A LEADERSHIP ISSUE

Why technically correct architecture systems often fail inside real organisations.

The notion that brand architecture systems are neatly organised into categories like ‘Branded House’, ‘Subbranded’, ‘Endorsed Brands’ and ‘House of Brands’ is a myth (not to mention an epic misunderstanding of the Brand Relationship Spectrum).

Most brand architecture systems are hybrid.

And most brand architecture systems are messy.

The simple explanation is that humans have an innate talent for fucking up beautifully designed systems: casual observers of traffic signals, open banking, the Circular Economy, blockchain and liberal democracy will know what I’m talking about.

Fun as it is, this explanation doesn’t help much if it’s your job to develop brand architecture systems that succeed. So I’ll be more specific: the causes of messy brand architecture systems are technical, structural and cultural. Understanding the nature of these causes is the first step to making brand architecture work in the wild. Before doing so, it’s worth establishing why on earth you’d want to bother improving an organisation’s brand architecture system, given the challenges involved.

Why bother?

Brand positioning (or purpose or whatever term you prefer) grabs all the attention, but a well-designed brand architecture system is the most powerful branding tool available to any organisation that aspires to be more effective and efficient.

More effective: because each part of the system is designed to support the whole in a way that helps achieve the system’s aims.

More efficient: because well-designed brand architecture systems can reach the greatest number of people, satisfy the broadest set of needs and communicate the

strongest meaning, using the fewest resources.

Organisations with poor brand architecture systems waste millions investing in brands that deliver poor financial returns, confuse customers, damage workplace culture and undermine the organisation’s stated purpose. The following are common symptoms:

• You find it difficult to explain why some of your brands exist
• Colleagues struggle to summarise your offer on a single page
• Your organisation is spreading investment too thinly across too many brands
• Every time there’s a new innovation or initiative someone creates a new brand or subbrand
• There’s no visual consistency, or logical system for branding and naming products and services
• Customers can’t remember what you sell
• Your sales team isn’t confident selling your offer
• Each department and team seems to have its own logo and PowerPoint template

If your organisation exhibits none of these symptoms, then congratulations! You have a well-designed and well-executed brand architecture system. You should probably write a book about it.

If not, then perhaps it’s worth reading on.

Technical challenges

I won’t labour the technical aspects since they are covered in detail in my most recent book. Here’s the short version. Many brand architecture systems exhibit the following technical failures:

• They don’t reflect the commercial realities and priorities of the organisation
• They don’t build on the company’s positioning or purpose
• The roles of each part of the system aren’t clearly defined
• The system lacks a clear taxonomy or hierarchy
• Fixed and flexible brand assets are poorly defined
• The system hasn’t been stress-tested to make sure it works in context

These challenges are relatively easy to overcome. With the right approach, it’s eminently possible to design a brand architecture system that reflects an organisation’s commercial ambition and brings its positioning to life, with well-defined roles and clear visual and verbal signposts that have been thoroughly stress-tested.

But this doesn’t guarantee success.

Your architecture system will only work if it is embraced by the organisation: marketing teams need to agree not to go off-piste when branding different parts of the offer; product and innovation teams need to resist the temptation to break carefully considered rules; leadership needs to avoid coming up with new brands and initiatives on the fly.

Brand architecture systems require people across an organisation to follow a carefully established set of rules. Inevitably, people will want to break those rules wherever possible. We humans thrive on autonomy and will look for any excuse to preserve it, even when we know this runs contrary to the interests of the organisation as a whole.

The hard part is not defining the system. It’s getting people to stick to it.

Structural challenges

For such reasons, brand architecture projects often become very political very quickly.

When a large, complex organisation commissions a brand architecture project, it’s almost always driven by a desire to establish greater consistency across teams and regions. This is a noble aim, but only to the extent that the market is willing to tolerate. If the organisation wants to compete effectively in different categories and meet the needs of different types of customer, there’s only so much uniformity it can impose. The risk is that the brand architecture system becomes too simplistic to adequately reflect the underlying diversity of customer needs.

Flexible architecture systems that allow for a greater number of autonomous brands require less discipline and allow teams to work with greater independence. But they are also more complex to manage. The risk here is that the system’s complexity is the result of internal politics, cultural misalignment and fiefdom-building, rather than underlying market needs. It’s difficult for leaders to look effective when their organisation looks like a free-for-all.

This is the fine line brand architecture treads in practice: overly simplistic approaches limit an organisation’s ability to reach different markets and satisfy different needs; overly complex approaches confuse customers merely to satisfy internal teams’ desire to act autonomously and with minimal oversight. The ideal brand architecture system follows a simple principle:

As common as possible, as different as necessary.

In practical terms, this means that an architecture project should be approached with a desire to find as much common ground as possible, but with enough flexibility to allow for important differences. Often the answer needs to be teased out, which is why I usually explore two or three approaches: one might place a greater emphasis on commonalities; another might accentuate the differences a little more; the third might sit somewhere in the middle. Seeing how different parts of the organisation respond to these alternatives helps to strike an appropriate balance. This also helps to build faith in the strategy process and commitment to its outcome: people tend to be much more inclined to support a brand architecture system they have played a part in developing.

Brand architecture is a team sport.

Cultural challenges

Culture doesn’t just eat strategy for breakfast: it can also spit it out.

Many people in many organisations simply don’t like change. And brand architecture projects often involve significant change: overlapping parts of the offer will be rationalised; gaps will be identified; waste will be uncovered and eliminated; every part of the offer will have to justify its existence. If done correctly, it’s a huge pain in the arse. In most organisations these issues are swept under the carpet or forgotten in the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day.

As Jim Collins observed: ‘good is the enemy of great.’

So it’s normal for me to hear the following couple of excuses:

1. We’ve always succeeded as a company, despite not having a ‘great’ (or even good) brand architecture system, so why start now?
2. Plenty of other successful companies also lack a ‘great’ (or even good) brand architecture system, so why should we be any different?

There’s an element of truth in these statements: few companies have truly great brands, so why bother trying? It’s entirely possible to succeed as an organisation with a brand architecture system that’s merely good enough. It’s also true that organisations can succeed with people who are merely good enough, a culture that rewards being merely good enough, processes and systems that are merely good enough, and equipment that’s merely good enough.

Such organisations deserve a brand that’s merely good enough. More than this, their merely-good-enough brand sets realistic expectations of what customers will experience.

Underpromise.

Underdeliver.

There’s no point trying to implement a great brand architecture system in cases like this. People across the organisation will always find an excuse not to execute. When an organisation approaches me with a brand architecture challenge, I ask the following question:

What are you prepared to change as a result of this project?

It’s a question that separates the serious from the merely curious. If the organisation is willing to change how its offer is structured and designed (including the parts that are currently selling well), how its teams collaborate, how it measures success, how it goes to market and how it innovates, then it’s serious. Context be damned. It doesn’t matter that other organisations are happy to be merely good enough.

Organisations get the brand they deserve.

If a company’s offer seems complex and chaotic from the outside, the chances are that’s because it’s complex and chaotic on the inside. If a company’s offer is easy to understand and to love, then that’s a strong indicator that the people in that company are understanding and love being there.

Brand architecture is a technical challenge. It’s a structural challenge. It’s a cultural challenge. Which means it’s fundamentally a leadership challenge. The corollary is that brand architecture represents a profound opportunity for most organisations. It’s an opportunity to establish a more efficient and effective approach to branding. It’s an opportunity to overcome structural misalignment and to transcend cultural dysfunction. And it’s an opportunity to lead: to show that greatness isn’t simply an abstract aspiration but an attainable achievement.