We love doing Brand Strategy with small businesses. There’s so much flexibility and maneuverability. It’s like driving a little sports car, as opposed to managing a corporate brand, which can feel like operating an aircraft carrier.

But we’re also happy to watch as our small clients grow and expand. I don’t think any of them have reached the Fortune 500 yet, but many have gone from a single office with 1 or 2 employees, to having multiple locations with larger staffs, serving diverse audiences with a wide range of products and services.

Growth is exciting, but it also brings new struggles and challenges. As you add more and more services and team members, ne of the greatest challenges is knowing how to maintain consistency. As we’ve said many times before, consistency is essential for effective branding. You want your audience to recognize the look and feel of your brand, and you always want to fulfill their expectations.

Brand consistency and brand diversity

As a business grows and evolves, it is likely to add new offerings. At some point, you might end up with such a diversity of products and services that you need to create a new brand.

You could have a luxury line of services for a high-end audience, for example, and a more affordable line for a value-seeking audience. So you want to differentiate, on one hand, but at the same time, you want to strengthen your brand with a certain degree of consistency.

Multiple Brands: The one and the many

Let’s take another, in which a doctor is operating three different clinics. Which makes more sense, A) to manage them as one brand with different locations, or B) to maintain three different brands? Of course, there are pros and cons to each approach.

With three different brands, you’re able to fine-tune your messaging and your visual identity for each target audience. But having one brand for all offices doesn’t mean you can’t adjust your messaging slightly. Most offices have more than one target audience anyway. The trick is to find something that unites all three offices. That’s why we utilize Carl Jung’s archetypal framework.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you know that everything revolves around your audience. So the very first thing you need to do is define your target audiences for each office. Not just the DEMOGRAPHICS (the kind of information the census collects), but also PSYCHOGRAPHICS (what makes your audience tick, what gets them excited) as well as their PERSONALITY (characteristics, goals, desires, fears, etc.)

Gather as much data on them as you can. Do that for each clinic and each target audience. Remember, you might have more than one audience for each clinic. Think about what their main objectives are when looking for care. Why would they come to you?

Understand the differences. But then take a good look and see if there’s anything they have in common.

Audience differences

Here’s a simplified version of what that could look like in a chiropractic office. Consider these three possible target audiences (TAs).

TA 1: Athletes. They are very driven and all about performance. They’re very active and they look for care to improve their performance and speed up healing when the occasional accident happens.

TA 2: Moms. Not all moms, mind you. But a very specific kind of mom. They tend to be pretty affluent. Their husbands often work as managers or own their own business, while the moms stay home raising the kids. They are very involved in their kids’ lives, driving them to soccer practice and friends’ houses, etc. They are concerned about healthy food, natural living, how much sugar their kids are eating, and so on. They buy their food at the local farmers’ market and cook their own meals most of the time. They try to do all the right things. They go to yoga class once or twice a week, and they see a chiropractor because they’re stressed and battle migraines.

TA 3: Young entrepreneurs and service professionals. Busy running their own businesses, they don’t have a lot of free time. They’re dedicated to their success and take excellent care of their customers, and they expect the same from the people who take care of them. They go to the chiropractor because they’re either sitting all day at a desk or they work in a physically demanding job like landscaping or construction.

At first glance, you might say that those three groups don’t have much in common. So you would need three different brands to best connect with each audience. But when we look a bit closer, we’ll notice that we could reach all three of them with a slogan like “We help you be your best!”

The common ground

With our help, you’ll optimize your performance as an athlete (TA1). We can help you be a better mom because you’ll be less stressed and have fewer migraines (TA2). And you’ll be able to offer better service to your customers because you’ll have fewer aches and pains, more energy, and all that with minimal time commitment because we know how valuable your time is. So we keep your appointments as short as we can (TA3).

You could show up as a Hero archetype for all of them, for example.

Another point to consider is whether or not those three brands would share the same purpose, vision, and values. If yes, they might work under one brand.

Brand Architecture

Even if you decide to create different brands for each location, there are a few different ways you can go about it.

House of Brands: Every sub-brand has its own brand strategy and identity (see Unilever, with sub-brands Dove, Persil, Vaseline, Lipton, etc.)

Branded House: One brand identity, adapted to each sub-brand (see Google, with Maps, Chrome, Drive, etc.)

Endorsed Brand: Each sub-brand carries the same values, but has its own distinct brand identity. The main brand “endorses” the sub-brand with its already established qualities and brand awareness (see Nestlé with sub-brands Kit Kat, Smarties, etc.)

There is also a hybrid approach, basically a combination of any of the above. See Coca-Cola, with sub-brands of Coke, Coke light, Coca-Cola Zero, etc. (branded house) and Fanta, Sprite, Dasani, etc. (House of Brands). Nestlé also has a hybrid brand architecture with some brands in a House of Brands (Häagen-Dazs, Thomy, Maggi, Felix, etc.)

Action Steps: If you’re struggling to manage multiple locations or offer an assortment of loosely related products, figure out if one brand would work for all your locations, products, and target audiences, That means doing your research!

And if the answer is no, then decide whether a House of Brands, a Branded House or an Endorsed Brand will make the most sense, depending on the alignment of each brand’s purpose, vision and values.

Keep it cohesive and carry on

Ready to get started? Or curious to learn more? The Brand Strategy Workbook will give you a good starting point to answer some questions regarding your brand. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out for a Discovery call or join our online community. It looks a bit confusing and overwhelming, but if you take it one step at a time, it all makes sense in the end. You got this! 

• Schedule a Discovery Call with Pacha
• Join our brand strategy Facebook Community: Balanced Brands
• Get professionally designed and curated content for your social media channels: Sign up for Social Stream

Dive deeper and take a look at these related articles.

• An Introduction to Brand Archetypes
• Adopting Brand Personas
• Speaking with Brand Voice