What is Intelligent Brand Portfolio Strategy?

Change the perception of your brand

It is a fact that every time your company introduces a new product it is an opportunity to change the perception of your brand!

Just think about how your perception of Apple has evolved as it added the iPhone, iPad, iTunes, and Apple TV to its core brand portfolio. Now think about how Amazon has evolved by creating hybrid brands such as AWS, Kindle, Alexa, and Echo to its portfolio. Both businesses have been able to expand dramatically from their original essence turning into technology powerhouses.

Traditionally, however, brand portfolio strategy has been expensive and complex to do. It generally involves issuing a rfp, consulting with an agency, as well as extensive research, analysis, and discussion. Budgets run in the hundreds of thousands.

There are multiple issues with this approach: it is time-consuming and expensive; it is not collaborative; it is intimidating, and the foundation for decision-making is not consistent. The alternative for companies who don’t have large branding budgets is to go by instinct or by default.

 Intelligent brand portfolio strategy is about to change that, as companies such as Remarkly are creating ways to use technology and AI to simplify the decision-making process.  

A bit of background

Brand portfolio strategy is the way a company chooses to manage its brands in support of its product portfolio, expansion, and business strategy. Some companies have many brands e.g., Amazon, some only have one e.g., Apple. There are different pros and cons of having one versus multiple brands.

Brand portfolio strategy come into play every time a company needs to decide about how its brand should interact with another entity, particularly in the following three situations:

·  The launch a new business, product, or service.

·  The acquisition of anew business, product, or service.

·  The opportunity to create a partnership e.g., with a collaborator, distributor, sponsorship etc.

In these instances, a company always has 3 choices:  Use an existing brand, use a modified version of the existing brand (either hybrid or related) or create a new brand. Finding out which is the best option involves evaluating key parameters such as strategy fit, brand alignment, target fit and market opportunity while considering the company’s overall brand strategy.

Why does it matter which brand is used?

Profitable expansion and growth are core to any business strategy. Not using the correct brand strategy for a new product could mean that the product never meets it potential or result in “over investment” in a new brand. On the other hand, companies that excel at portfolio strategy create different types of brands to build value and fuel their expansion over time.

Apple for example has built its core brand through association to a suite of products, all of which had a strong connection to its core brand identity, which has evolved over time.

Amazon has used a hybrid brand strategy to support its expansion into other categories further removed from its core identity by creating brands such as AWS, Kindle and Prime.
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Marriott is famous for its related brand strategy supporting its expansion where theMarriott brand acts as a guarantor for vast hospitality offering encompassing different price points and target audiences.

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YumBrands! follows an unrelated brand strategy and builds uniquely unrelated brands.
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Obviously, these are all big companies and well-known brands which have consistently built their portfolio strategy over time, but the concept applies to all businesses and especially to the fast-growing ones.

How Intelligent Brand Portfolio Strategy works

Intelligent brand portfolio strategy as spearheaded by Remarkly dramatically lowers the cost and time associated, empowers teams to easily explore, evaluate and validate ideas on a continuous basis, removes the dependency on a few specialists whether in house or external and ensures consistency and transparency in the data-input.

What we offer is a do-it-yourself tool with built-in, industry-validated decision-making processes thereby removing the barriers and making the strategic process available to a wide audience.

The tool has two key components. First, the portfolio assessment, which is a visually driven AI-powered tool that tells a company what type of portfolio it has, and its strengths and weaknesses based on its current suite of logos. So, for example if a brand manager from Apple were to upload all their logos, the AI would tell them that they had a core brand dominant brand sphere. If Amazon were to do the same, the AI would tell them that they had a hybrid brand dominant sphere etc.

The portfolio assessment is a starting point and gives the brand manager good insight in the core brand and its permissions.

The second part is the decision tool. Essentially, we have transformed the process an agency would use to advise a client on how to treat let's say a new product offering, into an automated decision tree, which the user feeds with their own input. Upon completion, the user receives a detailed report with the recommendation and its associated opportunities, risks and next steps. In doing, so we remove the complexity and guesswork and empower the user to take control. 

Ultimately, the goal is to support companies in achieving profitable and sustainable expansion and growth by limiting over investment and product failures. So, if you ever wished you could easily find out how a new product could support your brand, you now can.

Find more information on Remarkly.io. For more information on brand portfolio strategy, product introductions and acquisitions, follow us on linkedIn.