A deep dive in the Brand Architecture — Amati and Associates

Brand Architecture is — together with Brand Positioning and Brand Design — one of the three critical pillars of strategic branding. Of the three, it is the more static, tends to evolve less in time, and changes more drastically, less linearly. So what is Brand Architecture, and why is it important?

What is Brand Architecture?

Given a company that offers products and services in one or more marketplaces, brand architecture is the set of rules which describe the brand and trademark relationships between the corporate name, the products and services, and their potential trademarks. So, for example, french food giant Danone is a global, very notorious player in the food & beverage sector. Some of their products trade as Danone (or Dannon in the Americas), whereas others have their brand names like Evian, Alpro, Actimel, and FontVella. Some of their products are trademarked as Danio and Danette, which showcase an apparent reference to the mother company’s trademark. The brand architecture is the rules and expected relationships between those product categories and their respective trademarks.

Why is Brand Architecture important?

The approach is vital because it defines: