Brand Architecture

All marketers are enamored with buzz words and lingo. I am not immune. But for metaphor's sake, bear with me as I discuss Brand Architecture, the blueprint for brand building.

I'm not sure who coined this phrase, but it hit my radar around 1997 as I was working with Randel (Randy) Ransom at Coke trying to deploy a new brand positioning on FANTA into 142 countries around the world. We found out quickly that a positioning statement alone was insufficient to communicate brand strategy. Since then, I have found that this is true regardless of the geography or team size. Partners need additional guidance in HOW to bring a positioning statement to life in their functional area (advertising, point of purchase, media, etc). And if you aren't working with partners, then YOU need to do this work for yourself to map out how each marketing element will be used to establish the positioning.

The problem is that even well crafted positioning statements leave a fair amount of room for interpretation or misinterpretation as the case may be. To ensure consistent execution across functions and countries, we took the additional step to build-out a robust brand architecture that included activation strategy and example tactics across the core elements of the marketing mix. This gave business partners an overall, and specific, view as to how we intended to "activate" the brand.

In this blog, we have already tackled the foundational elements of a brand architecture, specifically functional benefits, emotional benefits, brand character and positioning statement. But a complete architecture extends into an activation strategy for each element of the marketing mix. In my experience, these strategies are often used as the creative brief for each functional area.

In my next post, I will introduce a simple template for activation strategy that ensures alignment to objectives and positioning strategy.