Portfolio and brand architecture can be a prickly thing. It should be, given its fundamental role in how an organisation presents its products and services and engages different ‘customer’ groups. There are many reasons clients arrive at the point of asking for help in this area. Sometimes it is driven by Marketing, sometimes Ops and sometimes the C-Suite.
Some clients come to me with a brand architecture problem (often not a written brief at first) asking for process and costs to ‘sort out the portfolio as things have got a bit messy with names and logos popping up’. I always ask if a brief is agreed as yet and who has signed it off, just because this tends to thrash out how the organisation sees the issue of brand architecture. Is it a ‘comms problem’, positioning issue(s), or portfolio hurdles that are hindering sales and growth, for example?
From there the conversation can go in many different directions. With brand architecture, I am interested initially in five questions which help to shape the client’s goals. I am trying to understand:
Does the client (so far) see the problem as something fundamentally strategic or executional (more about names and logos)?
Is this about rationalisation (or possibly expansion) of products and services – and if so why – or is it about tidying up what’s already there?
Are they looking for a consultant’s eyes and hypothesis, or to go out to relevant customer segments to understand their relationships and perceptions of sub-brands and other named entities?
What about the internal impact of this exercise? Product and service owners? Departments or job titles that will be affected if lines are changed /withdrawn / treated differently?
Will naming architecture, name creation and/or naming guidelines follow and form part of this exercise further down the line?
There’s lots of other questions of course and each client situation is unique, in the same way their portfolio is. For me, the questions above tend to open up the brand architecture brief so I can help clarify the drivers and objectives in the early stages. It could be that their brief is right for a brand strategist (hopefully me), it could be that they need more of a market research based approach and/or segmentation initially, or it could be that the brief heads straight for execution with a designer. The strategist’s job is to ask the right questions up front.
What are your openers when a brand architecture brief lands?
