Brand architecture is often an untapped opportunity for differentiation and greater engagement, lying dormant within your brand. Many brands simply present a list of products or services they offer, in a way that makes them easy to find and likely to be cross-sold. Or they follow the industry standards and present things exactly as all their competitors do. While parity can be a safe play, it doesn’t provide any advantages.

How you present your offerings to your audiences can communicate a deeper understanding of both what you offer and what you stand for, how you have a different point of view from your competitors, and why they would rather do business with you. So it’s not simply enough to have clear architecture, rather, you need to have an architecture that is optimized to reflect your brand.

Below are 5 key to-dos for optimizing your brand’s architecture in a way that ensures it will work as hard for your brand as the rest of your strategy toolbox.

1. Draw inspiration from your brand strategy

   • Consider how the elements of your brand strategy could shape your architecture

   • Explore how your architecture might tell the story of your brand idea

2. Ensure reciprocal flow of equity

   • Understand the role your brand plays in your products and services AND vice-versa

   • Develop a framework in which brand and products/services mutually benefit from each other

3. Build it from THEIR perspective

   • Consider how your key audiences think and navigate your industry

   • Research and understand their needs and motivations

4. Build for the future

   • Develop your architecture to be flexible, adaptable and extendible

   • Consider accounting for future acquisitions or new offerings

5. Manage with a growth mindset

• Cultivate a winning mentality between corporate and product brand owners—help all employees understand how they benefit from each other

• Drive continuous improvement—stress test it, relish opportunities and challenges, invite feedback from all brand/product owners

We hope that you find these points of consideration helpful as you review your brand architecture. To learn more about how we might help you, reach out to us. We’re ready to listen.