Audiences encounter brands through increasingly scattered moments: a social ad, a product notification, a customer service interaction, an app interface, a retail environment, a search result. On their own, none of these moments looks especially significant. But together, they define what people think a brand is. But the fragmentation makes it harder to truly capture attention and build the consistency needed to be remembered.
For marketing teams, that’s hard enough when you’re looking after one brand. It gets exponentially tougher when you’re juggling a portfolio of master brands, sub-brands, specialist propositions and product identities, each with its own story, system and stakeholders.
Coherence matters because no one outside your organisation sees the system.
They only see the moments.
There was a time where brand architecture – the strategic framework that organizes portfolio of brands, products, and services – was the preserve of brand geeks and marketing teams. It was seen as a carefully composed concept which internal teams would spend a lot of time sweating over, but which was never thought about after the meeting finished.
