Clear the big wall. Hand out three colours of sticky notes. Turn your phones face down, because for the next five sessions we are going to do the thing most growing companies postpone until a customer, an investor or a new hire asks a question nobody can answer: how do all our names fit together?
Here is what we are building. Brand architecture is the deliberate structure that sets out which brands a company owns, what role each one plays, and how they relate to the parent and to each other, so customers, staff and investors can understand the portfolio at a glance.
The method runs as five sessions, each with a clear output. You can run it yourself. You need a leadership team, a facilitator who is allowed to be rude, and a wall.
Before session one: who needs to be in the room?
Fewer people than you think. The right ones. You want whoever owns the commercial numbers, whoever owns marketing, someone from sales who hears customers mispronounce your product names every week, and one person with authority to retire a brand. Without that last person you will produce a lovely diagram and change nothing.
Leave the founders’ sentimental attachments at the door. Or rather, bring them in and name them out loud. Every portfolio has a brand that exists because someone senior loves it. Saying so early saves an argument in session four.
Homework before day one: collect every name the company uses in public. Products, services, apps, loyalty schemes, events, legal entities that appear on invoices, the old name still printed on the delivery vans. Everything.
Session one: the inventory wall
Put every name on a yellow sticky note. One name per note. Stick them up in no particular order.
This is the moment the room goes quiet. A company that believes it has four brands usually finds eleven. There is the newsletter someone named in 2019, the sub-brand a regional office invented, the acquired business still trading under its founder’s surname. Customers have been meeting all of these, even if the leadership team forgot them.
For each note, answer four questions on the back:
- Who is it for, and do those customers overlap with any other note on the wall?
- What does it earn, or what strategic job does it do if it earns little?
- What do customers actually know it for? Use evidence, not hope.
- Is there legal or contractual baggage, such as a trademark you only hold in some markets or a licence that expires?
The output of session one is an honest list with a short evidence line for each brand. Raw material. Do not start arranging yet: arrange too early and you end up drawing the org chart, and customers do not care about your reporting lines.
Session two: give every brand a job
Now pick up the blue notes. On each one, write the role a brand plays. Five labels cover almost everything, and they are plain enough for a boardroom:
Master brand. The name that carries most of the trust and appears most often.
Driver. The brand that actually wins the purchase decision. Sometimes the master brand, sometimes not.
Endorser. A parent name that sits beside a product brand to lend credibility without taking over.
Descriptor. A plain word that says what the thing is. Not really a brand at all.
Strategic or flanker brand. A name kept for a specific competitive or future purpose.
Stick a role next to every yellow note. Where you cannot agree on a role, mark it red. Red notes are the real agenda for session three.
One test helps here. Ask which name a customer would say aloud when recommending you to a friend.
Marriott shows roles being separated cleanly. In early 2019 it folded Marriott Rewards, Ritz-Carlton Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest into a single programme called Marriott Bonvoy. The hotel brands kept their own names and personalities; the loyalty scheme became one shared currency across the whole portfolio. Different brands, one job each, and nobody had to learn three sets of points.
Marriott Bonvoy’s own brand film: one loyalty name speaking for every hotel brand in the portfolio.
Session three: choose your model (or, which picture are we drawing?)
Now we draw. There are four broad shapes, and almost every real company is a blend of them.
Branded house. One name does nearly all the work, with descriptors underneath. Grab is the familiar Southeast Asian case: after dropping “Taxi” from its name in 2016, it built a long run of services named in the same way (GrabCar, GrabFood, GrabPay, GrabExpress), so every new service borrowed the trust of the last one. Cheap to launch into, risky if one service stumbles, because the bruise spreads.
Sub-brands. The master brand stays prominent, but products get names with their own character. Think of a parent name followed by a product name that customers learn on its own.
Endorsed brands. Each brand stands on its own, with the parent appearing as a quiet signature. Useful when you acquire a business whose customers love its name and would resent losing it.
House of brands. Separate names, separate personalities, parent largely invisible. Jollibee Foods Corporation runs this way. Alongside its own red-and-yellow bee, it owns or controls Chowking, Greenwich, Red Ribbon, Mang Inasal, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Smashburger, Tim Ho Wan and the Korean chain Compose Coffee. A family in Manila can eat at three of those in a week without ever thinking about who owns them, which is exactly the point.
Which model fits your portfolio?
Put a big sheet on the floor with four questions and walk the red notes across them:
- Do the audiences overlap? If the same customer buys from both brands and would be reassured to know they are related, lean toward the branded end.
- Would one brand’s crisis hurt the other? If yes, put distance between them.
- Do they make contradictory promises? A value brand and a luxury brand under one name will fight each other.
- Can you afford to build more than one name? Every separate brand needs its own marketing budget. Small companies routinely underestimate this.
Most of the companies I work with in Singapore end up somewhere near the branded end, simply because they cannot fund five names properly. That is a good reason, not a failure of ambition.
What do you call the parent when the children are famous?
This question comes up in almost every workshop, so it gets its own slot.
Sometimes the right answer is to give the holding company a new, neutral name and leave the famous brands alone. Singapore’s Sea did this in 2017, when the company that had been called Garena took a new corporate name. Garena stayed as the games business, Shopee kept its own identity in e-commerce, and the parent became a quiet umbrella over both. Facebook made a similar structural move in October 2021, renaming the company Meta Platforms while Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp kept their names.
Sometimes the move runs the other way and divisions are pulled together. ST Engineering ran its business units under separate names, including ST Aerospace, ST Electronics, ST Kinetics and ST Marine, until it harmonised them in mid-2018. ST Aerospace became ST Engineering Aerospace; ST Kinetics became ST Engineering Land Systems. For a group selling to governments and airlines worldwide, one strong name that buyers already trusted was worth more than four that asked to be learnt separately.
And sometimes the right move is a split. In October 2023 Kellogg Company divided into two listed businesses: Kellanova kept the global snacks such as Pringles and Pop-Tarts, while WK Kellogg Co took North American cereal. The Kellogg’s name was shared between them.
Then Mars bought Kellanova, a deal announced in August 2024 that finally closed in December 2025. Brand architecture is never finished, partly because corporate structure never sits still.
The lesson from all three: the corporate name and the customer-facing names do not have to be the same thing, and treating them separately often removes a deadlock.
Session four: write the naming rules
A model without rules decays within two years. Someone launches a product, invents a cute name, and the wall fills up with yellow notes again.
So session four produces a one-page rulebook. It should answer, in plain sentences:
- When does a new offer get a descriptor, and when does it earn its own name?
- What evidence must someone bring before a new brand is approved? A distinct audience and a separate budget are the minimum.
- What is the naming pattern? Prefix, suffix, a family of related words, or free choice?
- Who approves? One named person, not a committee that never meets.
- How does the parent appear on packaging, websites and invoices? Size, position, wording.
Sea shows what a consistent consumer-facing pattern looks like. In May 2025 it renamed its digital financial services arm from SeaMoney to Monee, a name that sits beside Shopee and Garena far more comfortably than a label borrowed from the parent.
Rules also head off the complaint I hear most from customers. Listen to engineers grumbling about product names and you hear the same thing: a tech giant’s AI tools scattered across too many sub-brands, cloud services with three-letter names that should sit under one umbrella, phone makers sharing a parent and factories who confuse buyers with five near-identical labels. None of those complaints is about logos. They are about missing rules.
How do you migrate without breaking things?
This is session five, and most companies skip it. They agree the architecture on Friday and send a press release on Monday. Then customers cannot find the product they bought last month.
Plan the move in phases:
Phase one: internal. Staff hear it first. They need the new names, the reasons, and a script for answering customers.
Phase two: high-visibility touchpoints. Website, app store listings, sales decks, signage customers see daily.
Phase three: the long tail. Old packaging runs out, contracts renew, vans get repainted. Set dates rather than hoping it happens.
Throughout, use a bridge. “Formerly known as” lines, redirects, a period where old and new sit side by side. Measure search traffic and customer-service calls for the old names before you start, so you can see whether people are getting lost.
And build in a review date, because you might be wrong. Dell discovered this in public.
Early in 2025 it retired the XPS name, along with much of its familiar line-up, in favour of a simpler Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max structure; the XPS 14 became the Dell Premium 14. Enthusiasts and reviewers disliked it, and at CES in January 2026 the company’s chief operating officer announced XPS was coming back as the flagship consumer brand.
Simplification is a good goal. Deleting a name customers had spent years learning to trust was not the way to reach it. A clear review point lets you correct course before the damage sets.
A worked example: the Paya Lebar bakery group
Picture a family bakery business with three outlets in eastern Singapore, a catering arm, a frozen-pastry line sold through supermarkets and a recently acquired kueh shop with a loyal following.
Session one finds nine names, including two different spellings of the bakery itself. Session two decides the bakery name is the master brand and the driver for catering and frozen goods. The kueh shop is a driver in its own right; its customers queue for that name, not the parent’s.
Session three lands on a hybrid: catering and frozen become descriptors under the bakery name, and the kueh shop is endorsed with a small “by” line, so the bakery’s food-safety credibility helps supermarket listings without erasing a name built over decades. Session four writes a rule that no new name is created without a separate customer group and its own budget. Session five sets the order: staff briefing, then the website and supermarket packaging, then the outlet signs at their next renovation.
Nine names became four. Nobody lost anything customers valued. That is the test of a good architecture: it removes clutter the company noticed and keeps everything the customer did.
A note on larger groups and the Gulf
The same method scales. The Emirates Group, owned by the Government of Dubai, runs the airline under the Emirates name while keeping dnata, its aviation-services business founded in 1959, under its own identity. Ground handling and catering are sold to many airlines, and a separate name lets that business serve other carriers without looking like one airline’s back office. That is architecture serving commercial reality, which is all it should ever do.
Questions from the workshop floor
How long does it take to create a brand architecture?
For a small or mid-sized company, the five sessions can run over three to six weeks, with the migration taking anything from six months to two years depending on packaging, signage and contracts.
Is brand architecture the same as an organisation chart?
No. An org chart shows who reports to whom inside the company; brand architecture shows how names relate in the customer’s mind, and the two often look quite different.
Which brand architecture model is best for a small business?
Usually a branded house or something close to it, because one strong name is far cheaper to build and maintain than several, unless two audiences genuinely conflict.
Ready to clear your own wall? Our brand consulting team runs these sessions with leadership teams, sticky notes included.
