Brands Within a Brand: How to Avoid Dilution

Can you give services or products their own brands without diluting your company's overall brand?

When we talk about a brand, we're talking about a company's identity—its way of being in the world. At its most basic, a brand is what a company says and how it says it, combined with its look and feel. 

It's tricky enough to get one brand right. But when a company also has a group of services or products that warrant their own distinct identities or sub-brands, that gets even trickier. 

If not done strategically, sub-brands can easily overwhelm or distract from the company's overall identity. As a result, prospects get confused about what a company offers, which in turn hurts sales and growth. At its worst, poorly executed sub-brands can even damage a company’s reputation.

Too Many Logos is Just a Symptom

Roger That client Scribe Media did a great job of streamlining their approach to product branding in the brand refresh and website redesign they carried out with us last year. 

Like many startups, Scribe is a company that moves incredibly fast and is continuously iterating and improving upon itself. When Matt Young started designing for Scribe, he  noticed early on that he was getting a lot of requests for new logos as the company launched new products, initiatives and campaigns.

"We were reinventing the wheel within our brand five or six times a year,” Matt recalled. “We were spending all this effort and time and energy on something that was unintentionally diluting our brand equity.”

If you find yourself with too many logos, that may be a symptom of a deeper problem with your brand strategy and user experience.

Grouping services or products into categories can be a useful tactic as long as it’s done in a way that makes sense for your customers. A great test for whether a product or service deserves its own brand is to consider the audience, value proposition and market position for each one – and compare them to those of the company. If they're similar, a separate brand identity will likely hurt more than it will help.

The tipping point for Scribe came when they chose to reposition themselves as the leader in professional publishing to reach a more influential audience. Redesigning the website was an opportunity to streamline a scattered set of logos and design styles into a more cohesive and scalable brand.

"Book Writing, Book Publishing, Book Coaching and Book Marketing—That's what we do for our authors.  It's so much easier to describe what we do now that we’ve grouped our products into clear categories, where before it felt like a bunch of disparate products,” he said.

On its new website, Scribe groups its services under the sections of Book Writing, Book Coaching, Book Publishing, and Book & Author Marketing. Matt says this change has made it much easier to communicate about what Scribe does.

Better yet, as the company continues to grow, Scribe can funnel new offerings into those four buckets instead of starting from scratch for every launch. It not only allows the team to move more quickly and efficiently, but also creates clarity and a better experience for their customers.

What Ties it All Together?

Just because a service or product group has its own identity doesn't mean the sub-brand should be a total departure from the company's overall brand. The most effective examples of this are where the brands share a visual theme to tie them together. Your brand should be instantly recognizable, no matter which product category you're looking at.