A logical succession
Editor’s note: Kevin Waters is a San Francisco-based researcher.
Master brand or co-brand? Which brand should be emphasized? What type of endorsement brand strategy? Decisions, decisions, decisions.
Knowledge - and anticipation - of a brand’s portfolio, and the branding hierarchies/architectures used within the portfolio, is as important today as ever before. Deciding how to represent the portfolio from a brand architecture standpoint is becoming increasingly challenging. Corporations continually jockey to strengthen or tweak their portfolios, be it through acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing deals, extensions of current brands and/or development of entirely new brands. Presumably, all of these deals and decisions are framed around a strategic intent - not only for the brand in question but the broader portfolio (and corporate context) as well. Failure to think along these lines can, and often does, lead to confusing, and in some cases contradictory, messaging.
ROI pressures and the desire to create efficiencies and leverage adjacent brand strengths often lead to decisions of marrying different brands via some sort of brand hierarchy/architecture structure. In these situations, the premise is generally clear: that one of the married brands could benefit itself, the other brand or both brands via some sort of equity flow (i.e., the transference of desired value, imagery or perceptions of one brand to another, in the process achieving the desired or declared strategy for the newly-formed aggregate brand entity). Addressing these options and answering these questions, however, is not always as straightforward as the initial intent, nor as forward-looking as it could be.
For clarity, it’s worth a brief review of brand hierarchies and architectures. While many options and variations exist, and seem to be growing every day, for the purposes of this article, these can be distilled down to the three basic configurations shown in Figure 1.
Guide the decision-making process
It should come as no surprise that research among target audiences is often relied upon to guide the decision-making process for brand hierarchy initiatives. The underlying goal of such projects is to arbitrate among (sometimes) several different options and choose the “best” option to move forward with. Additionally, and related, oftentimes multiple agendas cloud the overall research task at hand, and agreeing on what constitutes “best” becomes an onerous project in and of itself. Further complicating the issue is the tendency to resort to a “test all options” mentality, meaning that a larger consideration set exists from which to draw a conclusion.
Unfortunately, some of the strategic intent around certain brand options is not completely shared, known or even agreed upon at the start of these initiatives. As such, the eventual research output can be prone to decisions being made that often do not align with current and longer-term strategy for the brand and the broader portfolio. Much of this stems from failure to agree upon or establish appropriate action standards at the outset, as well as insufficient information-gathering before the investment in research.
Conducting stakeholder interviews
While timing and budgets do not always allow, and while certainly not a novel idea, the practice of conducting stakeholder interviews prior to the onset of research, and preferably before decisions on overall research design and scope are made, is strongly encouraged.
Stakeholder interviews, in this case, are brief discussions with key personnel across various departments, all of whom are involved in the branding hierarchy or related business decisions. Augmenting this task with some review of the current brand portfolio and recent, plus planned, branding decisions is also wise, simply to understand how brand combinations have been created to reflect the broad strategic initiatives.
Not only does such information assist in important methodological considerations for the research (particularly in regards to what should be included versus what is not needed as options to assess) but it also provides valuable insights to help in post-research interpretation and overall brand structure recommendations.
The following is a partial list of some of the more typical questions that should be asked at this stage:
What is the proposed brand hierarchy supposed to communicate to the target audience(s)?
Is either of the brands being tasked with transferring equity or some perceptual imagery/association to the other brand? If so, which brand, and what desired imagery or associations are being transferred?
Does the corporation tend to operate with multiple, distinct brands or are brands all linked to some common corporate or master brand?
Is either of the brands a candidate to become a stand-alone brand, without any connection to a corporate or related brand?
Is either of the brands being considered for further brand or line extension?
Responses to these questions become important in helping to determine the overall research objectives and also in deciding what to include/exclude in the actual research survey.
As an example, let’s consider a question pertaining to whether a brand is being groomed to become a platform for a new family of brands - perhaps an entry into a different market segment for the corporation. Let’s assume this is Brand A, as depicted in the examples in Figure 1. If the answer to this example question is yes (i.e., Brand A becoming an eventual new platform brand), it is probably most efficient to consider different options of endorsement brands and/or dual/co-brands as research stimuli, rather than master brand examples, as the former configurations tend to emphasize a specific brand that could eventually stand alone and become a platform for further extensions (i.e., FedEx Kinko’s [now FedEx Office] or Select 55 in our example from Figure 1). Based purely on this objective, while including different examples or versions of the master brand option might be nice-to-know, such information really does not support the stated objective and thus leads to the risk of confusing data, and also conclusions, for decision-making (not to mention potential for politically-charged discussions). Obtaining information through the use of pre-research discussion a la stakeholder interviews can help focus the stimuli needed for research and eventual answering of the overall research questions and eliminates the potential for contradictory, misleading or wasteful data and related decisions.
The action standard
Agreeing on what to assess in the proposed research, and making sure this aligns with stated research objectives, is a key initial step in brand hierarchy initiatives. A second main consideration is agreement on the actual survey questions to which a decision will be linked and rendered. This is commonly referred to as the action standard.
A decision on what the action standard will be, or which metrics to use, can take many directions. Unfortunately, one common tendency is to resort to “what’s been used in the past,” even if the current initiative objective differs from other past research programs. A good example here is the selection of some hedonic metric, such as overall preference, as the survey question to use in basing your decisions. While an important indicator of success (i.e., all marketers want their product/service to be preferred by their target audiences), this should not be considered as a primary action standard determinant in brand hierarchy initiatives/decisions.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One, focusing purely on a preference measure prohibits the marketer/researcher from understanding what the brand combination communicates from an image/perception perspective, thus leading to little (or no) information on overall fit/alignment with desired brand strategy. And two, preference measures are often influenced by other items, one of which is overall awareness (i.e., people gravitating to the familiar and tending to prefer what they are already used to or know about as opposed to something specific about the desired direction of the brand). This situation also tends to provide a false, or limited, sense of performance for the proposed brand hierarchy options by failing to account for the desired direction of the brand combination from an imagery standpoint.
Again, while the above can be important success indicators, they are not always the best or most appropriate action standards for brand hierarchy initiatives. There is no arguing that such questions will always provide an indication of which option won, even though that “winner” may not necessarily coincide with strategic direction for the brand from an image/perception point of view. Additionally, as brand hierarchy initiatives continue to be investigated, repeated use of preference as an action standard can lead to a brand portfolio that is jumbled with respect to strategy. You’d essentially have a group of brands/brand representations that all share a common thread of being “preferred” but likely differ considerably in, or do not align at all with, stated strategic direction.
Purchase intent
A related research action standard candidate, and probably the most turned-to option regardless of the initiative, is purchase intent, or some sort of scalar or choice-based question that gets at overall interest in purchasing a product or service. There’s no argument that, at the end of the day, marketers market their product and build the brand to persuade eventual purchase of it. In this context, it’s difficult to debate the merits of purchase intent as a de facto metric for decision-making.
However, and at the risk of generating debate, there are arguments against purchase interest as the main action standard in brand hierarchy initiatives. Simply put, purchase interest metrics are often very highly correlated with preference data and thus fall victim to some of the same cons or issues mentioned above.
A more desirable option is to include purchase interest as one part of the action standard equation but to augment it with some form of brand image/attribute measures specific to the brand/branding initiative. This allows for inclusion of a key, and traditional and standard, measure of purchase but also for some custom measure of perceptions generated by the proposed brand combinations/hierarchies. It also provides for a more robust analysis of the data and simplification of decision making once results have been analyzed.
Figure 2, which utilizes a simple-yet-powerful quadrant map to depict performance of different brand hierarchy options across two dimensions, is based on the augmented action standard example described above. The y-axis (vertical dimension) shows the overall strength of purchase interest for the different brand options under consideration. The x-axis (horizontal dimension) brings in performance of the different brand options on key strategic imagery attributes defined for the brand or specific to that initiative.
These imagery attributes can take the form of an aggregate set of measures to reflect an overall profile for the brand (e.g., the average of five or six attributes) or it might consist of a single critical attribute or pair of attributes. The flexibility in the subsequent analysis and synthesis of the data from this type of design is very beneficial to the researcher and it is also an important criterion to agree upon prior to the initiation of such research (i.e., in the stakeholder interview stage, for example).
Interpretation of the map is straightforward, thus providing benefits for management presentations and ultimate decisions. A goal in any brand-related program is to ascertain what the brand/brand entity communicates (i.e., is it in line with declared strategy?) and whether it prompts positive purchase intentions (i.e., does the audience claim they will buy it?). Brands or brand hierarchy options that deliver in both areas (or dimensions) stand a better chance of achieving success in the marketplace and also in the development/management of a cohesive brand portfolio for the corporation. Options falling in the upper-right-hand quadrant of the map (high purchase intent, strong brand image association) achieve these objectives and are, therefore, top priority candidates to consider for implementation. Those falling in the opposite quadrant (the lower-left) fail to generate adequate purchase interest or desirable image perceptions and should be excluded from the consideration set.
The remaining two quadrants require additional assessment. Those in the upper-left (high purchase intent, weak brand image) should be investigated as potential candidates in that they deliver on one key dimension (claimed interest in purchasing) but lack sufficient association with key strategic attributes. Direction for these candidates could include reviewing the analysis one attribute at a time to see if a specific attribute, or a few, are failing to achieve desired communication goals. This pinpoints areas where the marketer could adjust the mix to improve perception of the attributes in question, perhaps by altering the visual identity of the proposed brand combination to improve and deliver on desired perceptions. The final quadrant in Figure 2 (lower-right; strong brand image, low purchase intent) is also delivering on “half” of the action standard by communicating desired brand imagery. Depending on the purchase interest strength, options falling in this area could be candidates to consider since they fulfill the desired brand declaration which, if the strategy is sound and executed properly, should lead to eventual building of purchase interest (and sales) with time.
Without sacrificing the rigor
Branding and brand hierarchy decisions are complicated enough, and approaches to providing decision insights should be simple, without sacrificing the rigor in the decision-making process. The opinions and approach shared above form a proven method for creating clarity for such initiatives. By grounding the research with some basic a priori information-gathering and then supplementing that information with research approaches and syntheses that focus on key (dual) dimensions, marketers can more easily identify promising options that not only fit with desired strategy but also provide an ongoing process that will positively impact future development of the corporate brand portfolio.