Like a house needs a strong foundation or a product relies on a prototype, a thriving business depends on a solid base: its brand architecture.
Brand architecture serves as a roadmap, defining offerings and guiding key decisions. By linking your parent brand with sub-brands, it aligns identity, messaging, and positioning—creating a cohesive presence across your portfolio.
This guide covers what brand architecture is, introduces four main strategies, and shares practical steps for developing a brand architecture strategy that enhances your brand equity and secures a leading market position.
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What Is Brand Architecture?
Brand architecture is the strategic framework that defines relationships between a company’s parent brand and its sub-brands. Research shows organizations with a clear brand architecture achieve 3.5 times more visibility than those without it.
As Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Creating Brand Value, explains, “Brand architecture specifies the blueprint for the interdependent relationships of a company’s brands.”
Whether you lead a startup or a multinational corporation, a well-structured brand architecture highlights strengths, reduces confusion, and positions your offerings to maximize impact.
The Value of a Brand Architecture Strategy
A thoughtful brand architecture strategy offers several benefits:
- Protects premium brands: Sub-brands or lower-priced brands help reach broader markets while preserving the value of premium offerings
- Enables targeted segmentation: Tailor brands, products, and experiences to distinct customer demographics
- Supports business growth: Expand into new product categories or price tiers without disrupting the core brand
- Preserves brand equity: Clearly defined roles safeguard long-term portfolio value
- Streamlines marketing and operations: Organized brand relationships improve coordination of messaging, distribution, and management
Designing your brand architecture intentionally enables thoughtful expansion—launching new offerings, adapting to customer needs, and protecting your value proposition while remaining agile.
Types of Brand Architecture Strategies
Before choosing a brand architecture strategy, it’s important to understand the options, including their differences, strengths, and weaknesses.
Mono-Brand Strategies
Also called a “branded house,” mono-brand strategies use one brand for all products and services, says Avery in Creating Brand Value.
A clear course example is Yamaha. Originally known for musical instruments, Yamaha now applies its name and logo to motorcycles, home theater systems, boats, and generators. This approach saves time and expenses by avoiding new brand launches and strengthens recognition through unified promotion.
However, a single name for multiple products can confuse customers, and issues with one product may affect others. As Avery warns in Creating Brand Value: “When a brand is stretched too broadly across multiple categories, its meaning can potentially become diffused—less precise, less distinct, and less clear.”
This lack of differentiation can harm the customer experience, reputation, and, ultimately, lead to brand dilution.
Multi-Brand Strategies
Known as a “house of brands,” this approach creates separate brand names for different products, lines, or ranges, as Avery explains in Creating Brand Value.
Procter & Gamble exemplifies this, as discussed in the course, managing numerous brands across categories like laundry detergent, baby products, and personal care.
Advantages include:
- Unique brand identities, brand stories, and targeted marketing strategies
- Flexibility to reach niche segments and occupy shelf space
- Risk mitigation—challenges with one brand are less likely to affect others
However, this strategy increases complexity and cost. Managing multiple brands demands more resources and can spark internal competition if one brand outshines others. Entering new markets is also harder, as each brand must build a separate image and tailor its approach for distinct audiences.
Sub-Branding
“Sub-branding involves pairing the parent brand with another brand where the two work together in partnership to create and communicate meaning,” Avery says in Creating Brand Value. This tactic gives a product or service a specific identity for a targeted audience segment while leveraging the parent brand’s equity.
A notable example is Dove’s Dove Men+Care, designed specifically for male consumers. In the course, Sharon MacLeod, Dove’s former brand manager, describes their goal as encouraging men to care for themselves and those around them. By aligning the sub-brand with fatherhood and emotional well-being, Dove extended its values to a new demographic.
For sub-branding to work, the parent brand must be strong enough to support it. As MacLeod notes in Creating Brand Value, “The sub-branding strategy the team employed may have helped men feel comfortable that this was not the old Dove brand they knew, but a new one made just for them.” Simultaneously, loyal customers saw Dove Men+Care as a complementary addition that respected the original brand’s meaning while broadening its reach.
Endorsed Branding
Endorsed branding features the parent brand in a supporting role, reassuring buyers of credibility and reducing risk, Avery explains in Creating Brand Value.
It’s like hearing “Brought to you by…” in an ad—one brand lends its reputation to another with a subtle connection, allowing endorsed brands to compete in new categories while benefiting from the parent brand’s reliability.
For instance, Kellogg’s endorses Rice Krispies, Frosted Flakes, and Eggo, prominently displaying its logo on each package. This builds consumer recognition and trust while allowing each product to maintain its unique identity.
Related: Listen to Professor Avery discuss how to build a winning brand portfolio on The Parlor Room podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.
How to Craft Your Ideal Brand Architecture Strategy
If you’re ready to start developing your brand architecture, here are three key steps you should take to ensure your strategy aligns with your business objectives and makes an impact on the marketplace.
1. Uncover Where Your Brand Stands
Evaluate your parent brand’s market position. Understanding brand perception helps you organize your offerings to benefit your business and customers. Tools like perceptual maps and digital marketing audits can help visualize your performance, assess competition, reveal industry trends, competitor actions, and audience priorities—all aligning your brand structure with broader business goals.
Following this approach equips you to choose a brand architecture strategy that simplifies operations, sharpens messaging, and creates room for growth—while staying true to your original brand.
2. Pinpoint the Strategy That Works for You
After reviewing your business goals and marketing effectiveness, choose the brand architecture strategy that best fits your organization. Consider:
- What opportunities exist to expand into new product categories or customer segments?
- What market trends affect your industry?
- What’s your brand’s return on investment (ROI)?
- How can operations and communication be improved?
Take the Turkish apparel brand Mavi as an example. Facing strong competition and needing to diversify beyond jeans, Mavi evaluated options ranging from lower-priced to premium offerings.
“For Mavi, the expansion beyond jeans was necessary to compete with players who had fuller lines and to lure more customers to their stores more frequently,” Avery emphasizes in Creating Brand Value.
Mavi adopted a mono-brand strategy with premium sub-brands and endorsements, launching lines like Mavi Gold, appealing to affluent audiences and those seeking more cost-effective options. This approach expanded their market reach, protected the core brand’s equity, and fueled sustainable growth in a competitive landscape.
3. Implement Your Brand Architecture Strategy
After selecting the brand architecture strategy that aligns with your business, implement it with a clear, actionable plan. Document key elements of your brand portfolio to maintain consistency and align with your brand’s mission, including:
- Overview of each brand
- Target buyer personas
- Brand relationships
- Key customer touchpoints
- Differentiators
Equally important is communicating the brand architecture across your organization. Everyone should understand each brand’s strategic role and how to convey it effectively to customers and stakeholders.
Following these steps prepares you to execute a brand architecture strategy that supports your brand’s future and remains adaptable in a changing market.
Build a Brand Architecture Strategy that Makes an Impact with HBS Online
What kind of future do you envision for your brand? Are you aiming to create a name that resonates across multiple categories or build a broad-reaching business with a diverse portfolio? The key is choosing the path that best reflects your brand’s goals and strengths.
As Avery stresses in Creating Brand Value, brand architecture decisions determine how closely your products are linked—or how much space each should have to stand alone.
Whether you prioritize consistency across your offerings or prefer each brand to tell its own story, a well-crafted architecture lays the foundation for high-value profitability and sustainable growth.
Ready to craft a brand architecture strategy that delivers meaningful impact and simplifies brand management? Explore Creating Brand Value—one of our online marketing courses—and download our free course flowchart to find the program that aligns with your marketing goals.
