Branded house
See also: monolithic brand
A branded house puts one master brand on everything, with products distinguished by descriptors rather than independent names: Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Docs. Marketing investment compounds, and reputational damage travels across the whole range.
In practice
Under this model the naming job is usually descriptor work, not brand creation. The discipline is resisting the urge to give a feature a fancy name it does not need: every invented sub-name spends attention the master brand could have kept.
Google shows both sides. Search, Maps and the other services carry the one name, and in 2015 the company reorganised under a holding company, Alphabet, with Google as one subsidiary and ventures such as Calico and Verily placed in separate ones. The related products kept the shared name, and the unrelated ones were not forced under it. That is the limit of the model: it holds while the products share a meaning.
In a naming project the branded house turns most requests into descriptor work. The usual failure is a team that wants a distinctive name for a feature that has the same buyer and the same story as the main product. The name is then a second thing to explain, it needs its own trademark screening, and it spends attention the master brand could have kept. The test for when a name is justified is on the sub-brand page, and the full comparison is in Brand hierarchy: branded house or house of brands?.
Where this sits in the process
The studio treats this as part of a single run rather than a separate service: the category is read, the creative direction is chosen from what the research found, candidates are generated in volume and then cut against criteria that were written down first. See how the studio works for what that produces, or the naming module for the stages themselves.
Related concepts
- Brand architecture: Branded house, house of brands, or something between: how portfolio structure decides what a new name is allowed to do.
- House of brands: Independent brands under a silent parent: why this model demands the most from every individual name.
- Sub-brand: When a product deserves its own name and when it only needs a descriptor: the sub-brand decision.
Further reading
- Brand hierarchy: branded house or house of brands?: How to structure the brands in a company: branded house, house of brands, endorsed brands and sub-brands. Real examples, and what each model asks of a new name.
Frequently asked questions
What is a branded house strategy?
A branded house strategy puts one master brand on every product and tells them apart with descriptors rather than separate names, as in Google Maps, Google Drive and Google Docs. Marketing investment compounds in one name, and so does reputational risk.
What is an example of a branded house?
Google is the familiar one: the master name stays constant and the descriptor says what the product does. When Google reorganised under Alphabet in 2015, unrelated ventures went into separate subsidiaries instead of stretching the Google name over them.
What are the advantages and risks of a branded house?
Every product benefits from the visibility of the others and the budget compounds in one place. The risk is that damage travels across the whole range, and a product that does not fit the master brand’s meaning has no room to differ.
What is the difference between a branded house and a house of brands?
A branded house shares one name across products, a house of brands gives each product its own name and keeps the parent out of sight. The first concentrates equity and risk, the second separates both at the cost of paying for every brand.
Sources
- [1]Google to reorganize and expand as Alphabet— The Christian Science Monitor
- [2]Brand architecture spectrum— WARC