Amy Will - Launching & Building a Brand For Dummies

House of brands (freestanding brands) consists of several stand-alone companies, product families, products, or services, each with its own brand identity, none of which refers to the corporate brand. Proctor & Gamble has a wide variety of consumer brands, including Bounty, Charmin, Gillette, Puffs, and Tide.

Most organizations and people use branded house architecture because it offers the following benefits:

Easier and more affordable: You build and manage a single brand.

Stronger: Everything you offer reinforces a single brand. Another way to look at it is that you don’t have a bunch of separate brands that dilute the master corporate brand.

Increased brand equity: A single brand generally has more equity built into it and is easier to sell. With multiple brands, a prospective buyer of the business may want some brands and not others, and will expect to pay less for the business as a result.

Here are a few situations in which the house-of-brands architecture may be the better choice:

You have deep pockets and a large corporation with diverse companies, divisions, or families of products or services.

You want to introduce a new product to the market that would dilute or clash with your existing brand’s identity. Suppose that an automobile manufacturer that built its brand around luxury vehicles decides to offer a line of economy vehicles. Selling economy vehicles would weaken the company’s reputation for designing and building luxury vehicles, so creating a stand-alone brand probably would be best.

You build or are planning to build a company by acquiring multiple stand-alone brands.

A key factor in successful branding is consistency, so if anything you’re introducing to the marketplace is inconsistent with your existing brand, consider creating a separate, stand-alone brand around it.

Do you really need to build a brand to accomplish your business, organization, or career goals? Well, not really, but building a brand will generally enable you to accomplish your goals faster and raise your level of achievement. In this section, I explain situations in which building a brand is always beneficial.

Whenever you do anything that affects others, you’re building a brand, regardless of whether you’re aware you’re doing it. A brand is simply the perception others have. The question isn’t really “Do I need a brand?” or “Should I build a brand?” The question is “Do I want more control of the brand being created?” When you make a conscious effort to build a brand, you’re making a decision to take a more deliberate role in influencing how people perceive your business, organization, products, services, or yourself.

Whenever you open a new business, you’re creating a brand, so before you even name your business, give some serious thought to how you’re going to create a brand around it. Especially pay attention to the following tasks:

Identify your niche — what your business plans to do different and better than existing businesses in the same space (see Chapter 2)

Define your brand identity — your business’s vision, mission, and values, and what makes it special (see Chapter 3)

Clarify your branding goals, and establish ways to measure your progress toward achieving those goals (see Chapter 4)

When you create a business, you create a brand, so think about your business as a brand from the get-go. Branding shouldn’t be an afterthought. If you already have a business, though, it’s never too late to benefit from branding.

People commonly launch successful businesses without branding even crossing their minds, especially freelancers and other sole proprietors or one-owner operations. Most of these same people eventually reach a plateau with their business, or they start to see that they’re losing business. For whatever reason, they realize that their business needs a boost and that they need to take a more active role in promoting it. They need a brand.

Creating a brand for an existing business is nearly the same as creating one for a new business. You’re essentially rebranding your business. You may keep the business name (so as not to confuse existing customers) or change the name to something that aligns more closely with your vision for the brand. But you perform the same first steps that you would for a new business: identify your niche, define your brand identity, and clarify your branding goals.

The initial steps in the branding process are about clarifying the vision you have for your brand. Subsequent steps focus on executing your vision. See “ Stepping Through the Branding Process” later in this chapter for a step-by-step overview of branding.

If you have an existing business and are introducing a new offering, you probably don’t want to rebrand your business to accommodate it. But you do need to think about how your new offering fits in:

Decide whether to introduce the new product or service under your existing brand or a brand of its own. If the new product or service strengthens your existing brand, introducing it under your existing brand name is probably best. If it’s likely to weaken your existing brand, creating a separate brand is probably best. See the earlier section “ Grasping Brand Architecture Basics.”

Identify your market niche for introducing the new product. How is the new product or service different from and better than what’s already available? If you decided to introduce it under your existing brand, how will it support and extend your brand?

If you’re introducing the product or service as its own brand, be sure to position and define that brand. See Chapter 3for details.

If a new product or service dilutes or clashes with your existing brand, create a new brand. Don’t try to expand your offerings with something that doesn’t fit.

You don’t have to start a business to benefit from branding. Just about anyone in the workforce who’s looking to advance their career can benefit from creating and managing their own personal brand. As I mentioned previously, your reputation is part of your personal brand. You just need to be more active and intentional about the content you’re putting in front of potential employers and clients. Here are a few ways you can start to strengthen your personal brand:

Create your own website or blog, and post regularly to it to demonstrate your knowledge, expertise, commitment, and generosity. See Chapter 7for guidance on creating a website or blog. Unless you’re consciously building a career as a critic or political pundit, don’t post negative content or attack any person, group, or organization. Remain positive. As your parents probably advised, “If you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all.”