MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

Management and Organizational Structure

Management and Organizational Structure

Introduction

The classic brand manager dealt with simple brand structures with few extensions, subbrands, and endorsed brands in part because he or she was faced with a relatively simple environment and simple business strategies. Today the situation is far different. The brand managers now face market fragmentation, channel dynamics, global realities, and business environments that have drastically changed their task. In addition, there is pressure to leverage brand assets in part because of the prohibitive cost of creating new brands.

To cope with these pressures and complexities, brand managers have had to create and manage brand teams that are often intricate and complex, involving multiple brands, aggressive brand extensions, and complex structures involving subbrands and endorsed brands. This set of challenges has created a new discipline that can be labeled "brand architecture" because it deals with relationships and structures not unlike those facing an architect who must design the structure and layout of rooms, buildings, and cities. A coherent brand architecture can lead to impact, clarity, synergy, and leverage rather than market weakness, confusion, waste, and missed opportunities (Chernatony and Harris, 2000, 268-274).

Brand architecture is an organizing structure of the brand portfolio that specifies brand roles and the nature of relationships between brands. This article introduces a powerful brand architecture tool, the brand relationship spectrum. It is intended to help brand architecture strategists to employ, with insight and subtlety, subbrands and endorsed brands. Subbrands and endorsed brands can play a key role in creating a coherent and effective brand architecture. In particular, they provide tools to:

allow brands to stretch across products and markets

address conflicting brand strategy needs,

conserve brand-building resources in part by leveraging existing brand equity,

protect brands from being diluted by over-stretching, and

signal that an offering is new and different.

Without subbrands and endorsed brands the choice of a new offering would be limited largely to either building a new brand (an expensive and difficult proposition) or extending an existing brand (and thereby risking image dilution). Their application can make a brand architecture work in a complex environment (Pearson, 1996, 52-177).

The brand relationship spectrum, as suggested by the figure, is related to the driver role that brands play. The driver role reflects the degree to which a brand drives the purchase decision and use experience. When a person is asked, "What brand did you buy (or use)? the answer they give will be the brand that had primary driver role responsibility for the decision. At the top, in the house of brands, each brand has its own driver role. With an endorsed brand, the endorser usually plays a relatively minor driver role. With subbrands, the master brand shares the driver role with subbrands. At the bottom, in the branded house, the master brand generally has the driver role and any descriptive subbrand has little or no driver responsibility(Liao et al., 2008a, 1763-1776).

The brand relationship spectrum recognizes that these options define a continuum that involves four basic strategies and nine ...