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In the mid-1990s, I was a young designer at Nike, just as the company was barreling toward $10 billion in revenue. We were building brand guidelines while chasing category growth—cross-training, basketball, running, tech, lifestyle. It was thrilling, until it wasn’t. Somewhere between the dozens of sub-labels and the explosion of marketing channels, we hit a wall: too many messages, too much inconsistency, and a brand system struggling to keep up with its own ambition.
That same tension—growth without clarity—was something I’d first seen years earlier, working on the merger between CitiGroup and Travelers at Lippincott in New York. The world’s largest portfolio consolidation at the time, it taught me the weight of brand decisions when billions are on the line. Which names stay? Which identities are absorbed or retired? What brand promise threads it all together?
Now, decades later, I see these same questions play out across midsize companies and nonprofits every week. The stakes are different—but the cost of confusion is just as high.
Most companies don’t start with complexity. But over time—through new products, acquisitions, reorgs, side hustles, partnerships, or enthusiastic marketing teams—they accumulate layers. What begins as a tight brand turns into a Frankenstein system: logos living on outdated templates, campaigns with competing voices, and sub-brands that no one internally can quite explain.
Enter brand architecture.
At its simplest, brand architecture is the decision-making framework that defines how your offerings relate to each other—and to your audience. Done well, it’s an invisible system that creates clarity, cuts costs, and builds equity. Done poorly, it’s the reason your marketing budget keeps growing while your market share stays flat.
As shown in Watson’s Brand Architecture guide (page 2), the most common structures include:
Whether we’re working with a national nonprofit like the Autism Society of America or a global manufacturer like ESCO, our approach starts with listening. We run audits to understand brand equity, stakeholder interviews to uncover tensions, and industry benchmarks to clarify what’s working—and what’s not.
From there, we map architecture options to the company’s actual goals.
And just as importantly, we identify what shouldn’t be there: programs that confuse, names that create redundancy, or legacy marks that no longer serve a purpose.
This often results in hard conversations. We’ve advised companies to sunset sub-brands, rename core offerings, or even walk away from long-standing campaigns. But the result is always the same: greater clarity, better performance, and teams that finally feel aligned.
So what should your brand architecture be?
Ask these five questions:
If you’re unsure of the answers, you’re not alone. In our experience, most mid-size companies wait too long to fix their brand architecture because they assume it’s a “design” problem. It’s not. It’s a business problem—with design implications.
