What's up brand builders Stephen Houraghan here at BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this
video you're going to learn what umbrella branding
is and how you can leverage it to serve a broad audience across multiple categories
now if you are new to these parts and you want to build brands that go beyond the visuals using
strategy psychology and creative thinking then you're in the right place hit that subscribe
button and the notification bell if you want to fast track your results make sure you grab the
pro brand strategy blueprint it's a free download the link is in the description now when you first
get into brand strategy certainly when i first got into brand strategy i tended to play around with
statements so you had your purpose statement your vision your mission your value statement
but the more i get into brand strategy the more i realized about the different techniques that were
available to leverage and some of those techniques allowed for strategic growth and umbrella branding
is one such technique so what is umbrella branding well it's a brand strategy that's used to leverage
the brand equity of a master brand to sell a variety or related products or services to a
broader segment of that audience so the enhanced reputation and equity of the master brand allows
the sub brands to go into the market with a reputation already attached and that obviously
helps sales and it helps the reputation of those brands so essentially these sub brands are using
the equity of the master brand to get a foot into the market and to really help the audience to
adopt those products or services now although each of these sub brands are leveraging the equity of
the master brand they still have some autonomy they still have some some autonomy in terms of
their messaging or their brand identity or maybe even their positioning it really depends on the
relationship between the master brand and the sub brands but that obviously is one of the advantages
of using this umbrella strategy it's by giving these sub brands the autonomy to go out and
do their own thing and appeal a little bit more specificity to the audience that they're trying to
engage so how does umbrella branding differ from family branding you might have heard of the term
family branding before well the answer is they don't they don't differ at all these terms are
used interchangeably so you might see family brand or you might see umbrella brand essentially
they mean the same thing this is the exact same structure but sometimes in marketing we use
different words that are used interchangeably so don't get confused between the two family branding
umbrella branding is the exact same thing so let's have a look at an example here of umbrella
branding so we all know who apple is apple is one of the biggest brands of the world and this is
a perfect example of an umbrella branding structure so with the umbrella brand of apple
you have apple sitting on top as the master brand and underneath you have all of its products so you
have the iphone the iwatch the ipad the imac so all of these are sub brands sitting within
the umbrella branding structure so the umbrella branding structure has apple sitting at the top
and all of these sub brands are leveraging the equity of the parent or the master apple brand
so when apple introduces a new product to the market that product is not going into the market
trying to establish itself without any kind of reputation that goes into the market and leverages
the reputation that is the apple master brand so this shows distinctly why
you would use an umbrella strategy like this if you wanted to leverage the equity of an
existing brand by introducing new products or new brands into a related market then
this is a great structure to use that for so what are the advantages and disadvantages
of the umbrella brand structure well we've covered some of those already obviously you are able to
leverage the equity of the master brand so that you go into the market with a pre-established
reputation you don't have to go out there and try and make a name for yourself for the first time or
raise brand awareness for the first time which is obviously one of the difficult
tasks within branding but you also have the added advantage of being able to leverage
any kind of success that any of these other sub brands have so again with the apple watch
the success of the iphone obviously buoyed the other products so when the iwatch was introduced
and the iphone was so successful everybody already had that iphone and you know it was pretty easy
to then adopt the iwatch so the apple brand was able to leverage the success of the iphone to sell
the iwatch now another advantage of this umbrella branding structure is the autonomy that you can
give to the sub brands now of course the sub brands are falling under the master brand so
you know in terms of its brand identity in terms of its messaging it all needs to follow
the brand guidelines of the parent brand to some extent every single relationship is different so
depending on the relationship between the master brand and the sub brand will depend on how much
freedom or how much autonomy the sub brand has but certainly the sub brand can get a lot more
specified with its messaging in terms of who it's speaking to that segment of the audience that is
trying to target and possibly alter the brand identity or the look and feel of how that brand
is presented now there are some disadvantages to this structure as well and one of those
is quality fluctuation you might have the quality level of one brand being a lot greater than the
quality level of another brand now obviously this is a management issue for the master brand but
that is one of the challenges that this structure can encounter and obviously when it comes to the
advantages of this structure and leveraging brand equity that is a two-way street so if anything
is contaminated here in terms of the reputation in terms of the master brand or any of the sub brands
if any of those brands take a hit in terms of its reputation well that will affect any of the sub
brands or the master brand itself so that is an obvious disadvantage to this structure now look
the term umbrella branding it is associated with the big end of town obviously the example here
i gave was apple and brands don't come really much bigger than apple does but you can also take
this structure into small businesses as well if you think about any given brand they have
a segment of the audience that they're trying to attract and within that segment they might have
one smaller segment where they have a product or service that appeals more to that segment
than it does their broader audience if that's the case then the umbrella branding strategy
is an option and again it doesn't just appeal to the big end of town it's really just about
structure how are you structuring your products or services and is there a structure that you can use
to leverage the equity of one brand but give autonomy to the other brands if you
want to really understand brand structure and how you can structure different brands
then this video on brand architecture with some examples to help you out we'll show you exactly
how you can do that until next time brand like a master and i'll see you in the next video