Journal
Everyone at the table has a different surname
You can read a brand family the way you’d read a family dinner. Watch who sits where, and notice the relative nobody quite knows how to introduce.
Brand families grow a bit like real ones. Each decision made sense when it was made. A product got its own name because it had to launch fast. A company you bought kept its sign over the door. A campaign name tested so well that it turned into a brand.
Then, years later, everyone sits down to dinner and a guest asks how they’re all related. Nobody has a quick answer.
Most families have a few of these relatives. Go easy on them. You’ll probably recognise at least two of your own.
The Founder
The original brand, the one with all the history. Still at the head of the table, even though fewer and fewer of the younger relatives use its name. You’ll find it on the annual report and hardly anywhere a customer actually looks.
The Favourite Child
The product that outgrew its parent. It has its own logo and website. Lately it’s started having opinions about the family too. Customers know its name better than yours.
The Adopted One
A company you bought that kept its name and pretty much everything else. Everyone was very welcoming, though nobody ever quite got round to introducing it. Its people still say “we” and mean the company they used to work for.
The Campaign That Stayed
A name invented for one launch that never went away. It has a logo now and a page on the website. It even has its own budget line. Ask who owns it and you’ll get a few different answers.
The Cousin Nobody Invites
A product that matters enormously to a handful of customers and hardly at all to anyone else in the company. There are good reasons for keeping it. Nobody has written them down.
The Twins
Two offers so alike that customers ask which one they should pick, and your sales team gives them different answers.
The chain
What a family without a family name tends to go through.
01
Every newcomer gets a new name
A new name feels like a fresh start, so every product, acquisition and campaign ends up with one.
02Break point
Nobody looks after the whole family
Each brand has someone fighting its corner. With nobody in charge of the family as a whole, everyone ends up guarding their own patch.
03
Customers can’t see the links
Buying from one relative rarely leads to buying from another, because nothing tells people they’re related.
04
The relatives start competing
Teams chase the same customers with the same budget, and it gets spread a little thinner every year.
05
Every decision goes upstairs
When there’s no agreed way to decide, questions get passed up and sit there.
06
Size starts to feel heavy
Things slow down, and getting bigger starts to look like hard work.
Start with an owner
Before anyone redraws the family tree, someone has to be responsible for all of it. Once there’s an owner, the hard questions get asked in a sensible order. Which names do customers actually value? Which ones are mostly history? And where should the next arrival sit, before it turns up and gets a name of its own?
- The conscious read
- Every name in the family costs something to keep, though most companies only ever count the cost of changing one.
- The romantic read
- A family that knows how it’s related can always find room for one more at the table.
If this sounds familiar