Brand architecture is defined as the logical, strategic and relational structure for your brands or put another way, it is the entity’s “family tree” of brands, sub-brands and named products. Two shorthand terms are often used to describe how an organization manages its brand architecture:
What does Super Bowl advertising and spam have in common? Both subscribe to the eyeball theory. In both cases, it’s about scale. In both cases, it’s about interruption. In both cases, it’s about hope.
Sometimes brands can help people feel certain emotions, emotions that may even be only tangentially related to the products themselves. Brands can create tremendous appeal by linking to or promising desired emotions.
In this article in Business Week, Howard Schultz talks about how the mighty Starbucks brand lost its way – mistaking aroma rather than coffee for the core of its business and embarking on a strategy that saw it shift seriously off-course.
What is it, exactly, that brand marketers want to do? Maybe this question only makes sense to marketing researchers like me because to many researchers it seems that, increasingly, marketers want us to do their jobs. I’m not being critical. I’m just wondering what the role of brand marketers will become if, or more likely when, researchers step up to the biggest strategic roles that marketers fill today.
