Key Points
- A naming architecture is a strategic framework that ensures brand names work together cohesively, preventing confusion across a growing portfolio.
- Branded house models, like FedEx, use a single master brand with descriptive sub-brands for clarity and ease of expansion.
- House of brands, like Procter & Gamble, give each product a unique identity, enabling tailored messaging and market segmentation.
- Endorser brand models balance autonomy and credibility by pairing sub-brands with a parent brand endorsement (e.g., Courtyard by Marriott).
- Choosing the right naming strategy depends on budget, competitive landscape, and long-term brand goals – often leading to hybrid approaches.
Is your brand naming strategy becoming a disorganized “house of cards”? Many businesses find themselves in this exact predicament. Just like a poorly planned home renovation where every room has a different style and hallways wind through awkward spaces, your brand portfolio can transform into a confusing hodgepodge without proper architectural planning. This guide explores how establishing the right naming architecture creates coherence and strategic advantage for your growing brand family.
What is a Naming Architecture?
Think of a naming architecture as the blueprint for how all your brand names work together. When you build a house from scratch, you create plans ensuring all rooms flow naturally and support one another. A proper naming architecture does the same for your brands – it ensures they create a cohesive experience for customers rather than confusion.
This strategic approach prevents a common pitfall we see in growing companies. Through organic expansion, mergers, and acquisitions, businesses accumulate names with wildly different styles. One executive wants something cool and hip, another prefers descriptive names, and before you know it, your naming portfolio resembles that disaster of a fixer-upper house where nothing quite fits together.
Popular Naming Architecture Strategies
The Branded House Model
Over the past decade, the branded house approach has gained tremendous popularity among growing businesses. This architecture features one powerful master brand with intuitive, descriptive sub-brands beneath it that clearly communicate their function.
Look at FedEx – they’re a perfect example. Think about it – FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Office. You don’t need a translator to figure out what these services do, right? The beauty of this setup is how easy it makes expansion. If FedEx jumped into ocean shipping tomorrow, they could simply roll out “FedEx Boat”, and we’d all get it immediately.
But here’s where things get tricky. Imagine some upstart competitor comes along with a revolutionary ocean service that’s three times faster than traditional shipping. Instead of a boring descriptive name, they call it “Streaker” – a name that practically screams speed and innovation. Suddenly “FedEx Boat” sounds about as exciting as lukewarm coffee. When faced with sexy, benefit-rich names like that, even the most organized naming system can start to feel inadequate.
The House of Brands Model
Now flip over to what Procter & Gamble does – it’s completely different. P&G built what we call a “house of brands”, where every product gets its own standalone identity. Think about your last trip down the laundry aisle – you grabbed Tide, or maybe Gain, possibly Cheer or some Bounce sheets. Did you even realize they’re all made by the same company? Probably not, and that’s intentional.
P&G crafts each name to speak to something specific – maybe one emphasizes cleaning power while another is all about that fresh scent experience. Every brand tells its own story and connects with consumers in a different way.
The Endorser Brand Model
The endorser approach offers an intriguing middle path by positioning the master brand after the sub-brand. You see this strategy in action with names like “Polo by Ralph Lauren” or “Courtyard from Marriott”.
This architecture serves multiple purposes. For Marriott, it protects the primary brand’s premium positioning, while allowing Courtyard to develop as a more self-service, amenity-light offering. The “from Marriott” connection lends credibility to the new venture, but as Courtyard establishes its own identity, that endorsement becomes less prominent in consumer minds.
Choosing the Right Architecture for Your Brand Portfolio
The ideal naming architecture isn’t one-size-fits-all – it depends entirely on your specific situation. Your marketing budget plays a crucial role in this decision. Creating distinctive standalone brands requires significant investment to build recognition and meaning. In contrast, descriptive names leveraging an established master brand need far less explanation and support.
Your competitive landscape matters tremendously too. When competitors offer distinctively named alternatives with strong benefit communication, purely descriptive names may struggle to create the same emotional connection and memorability with consumers.
The reality for many successful companies is that they eventually develop hybrid architectures combining elements from different approaches. This flexibility allows them to maintain coherence across the portfolio while adapting to various market conditions. Perhaps your flagship products merit distinctive branding while secondary offerings work better under a descriptive naming system.
Professional Guidance for Naming Architecture
While you might attempt to develop a naming architecture internally, this strategic challenge often benefits from specialized expertise. Professional naming consultants bring decades of experience navigating these exact decisions across industries. They’ve made the mistakes – sometimes more than once – so you don’t have to.
These experts help companies develop not just the architecture itself, but also decision frameworks that empower internal teams. When future naming needs arise, your team will have clear guidelines about when to create distinctive brands versus when to use descriptive naming approaches.
By investing in proper naming architecture early, you avoid the painful “house of cards” syndrome that plagues so many growing businesses. Instead, you build a brand portfolio that strategically reinforces your market position while remaining flexible enough to adapt as competition evolves. Your naming strategy becomes not just organized, but a genuine competitive advantage.
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Podcast Transcript
Mike Carr (00:02):
So is your naming like a house of cards? And what do I mean by that? So think about you’re in the market for a fixer upper home and you’re going around and you’re taking a look at some of these houses, and you walk into one that’s gone through, let’s say several remodels, and it’s just a disaster. Every room has a different style. Hallways are in weird places. The garage is an obvious, in a weird spot. There’s an extra bedroom that’s sort of been glummed onto the side of the house and the thing’s just a mess. Well, guess what? Naming can become a house of cards too. Through organic growth, through mergers, through acquisitions. You acquire new names, or you add names to a growing portfolio, and somebody wants this style of name cool and hip, and somebody else wants a different kind of name. And before you know it, you sort of have this hodgepodge, this house of cards when it comes to naming.
(00:57):
So what’s the solution? Well, a naming architecture, right? Think about a blueprint. If you could build a house from scratch, or if you’re going through a major remodel, you’ll have a blueprint that sort of lays out how all the rooms are going to work. They all flow together, they support one another. The hallways make sense if there’s this underlying structure. Well, that’s sort of what naming architecture can do for your naming. And there are different types of naming architectures, just like there are different types of architectures for homes, different styles. One of the ones that’s been fairly popular, I would say for the last 5 to 10 years at least, is what’s called the branded house, where you have one master brand. And then underneath that, all your names are more intuitive and more descriptive and easier to understand. So they don’t create any confusion.
(01:45):
And an example of that might be FedEx. So you have FedEx Ground, you have FedEx Freight, you have FedEx office. At one point you had FedEx Express. And so it’s pretty easy then to add new services to that naming architecture. So let’s say FedEx wanted to get into the Ocean Liner shipping business, right? These big, huge ships that sail across the ocean, like the one that ran into the bridge in Baltimore. Hopefully not. What would you call that? Maybe FedEx Boat? Boat makes a lot of sense. So you’ve got FedEx ground, you’ve got FedEx Boat, piece of cake. Everybody gets it until a competitor comes along. And this competitor has got a new kind of ship. It’s a big, huge ship on Hydrofoils, and it flies across the ocean. It zips and man, it can get your freight across the Atlantic or across the Pacific in one third the time that it normally would take a big ship to do it. And they don’t have a generic descriptive name like FedEx Boat. They have a sexy, cool, innovative name that’s exciting…
(02:59):
And engaging and just screams speed, like one of my all time favorite names that I talked about in the last podcast too. So now you have FedEx Boat or Streaker. Which name do you think is more engaging? Which name do you think conveys the value prop more directly? So now what do you do? Do you have to go back to the drawing board and change your naming architecture from a brown branded house to a house of brands? Procter & Gamble is an example of a house of brands. So they have very distinct names for each of their products. So they have Tide detergent, they have Cheer, they have Gain, they have Bounce. And each name maybe conveys something different about a benefit or the audience, the target they’re going after. Is that the right way to go? And you don’t know and you have to go start all over again.
(03:59):
And so that’s where we can come into play, or any professional naming consulting firm, is help you lay out a naming architecture that makes sense for you, that gives you the flexibility. So maybe every now and then you need a new brand name, but in other situations you want to go with a more descriptive, intuitive family set of names that don’t require as much of a budget. And those are the types of questions that we wrestle with you is branded names can be really cool and hip and exciting, but unless you have the budget, unless you have the time to build that kind of brand, they can often be a disaster. You have, they’re cool and they’re edgy, but nobody knows what they mean. And that’s the whole reason that these more descriptive and intuitive names often work best, unless you’re facing a competitor that’s got that cool hip brand name.
(04:56):
And there are other kinds of naming architectures too. There’s something called the Endorser brand, right? So you think about Polo by Ralph Lauren or Courtyard from Marriott, you’re not putting the brand name in front, you’re putting the brand name after. Why in the world would you want to do that? Why wouldn’t it just be Marriott Courtyard or Ralph Lauren Polo? Well, there are lots of reasons. One reason is you want to protect that master brand. You maybe want the Marriott brand, the Marriott brand, to be associated with perhaps a little more premium experience, a little bit more of that self. Hey, the concierge there, the valets there, they’re taking care of you. Whereas courtyards, more of that do it yourself, maybe a little bit bigger room. You’ve got your kitchen and whatnot. And that’s more for the folks that aren’t interested in all those amenities.
(05:50):
So it might help you launch a new brand like Courtyard or like Polo. But then once that brands that by Marriott isn’t nearly as important. And there are other reasons for following the endorser strategy or the house of brand strategy or the branded house strategy. But part of what that naming architecture is going to give you is not just the blueprint, but it’s also the process for how you can name things on your own. It’s going to give you a decision tree. So your internal folks and crews are sort of guided in the right direction that well, you might want that really cool hip name that’s really not going to be best for you. In this particular case, because of the ways you answered these questions, you don’t have the budget, you don’t have the time. The competitive situation is a little bit different. So the right naming architecture might even be a hybrid.
(06:43):
It might allow for endorser brands, it might allow for a master brand over here. It might allow for a few sub-brand names. So the point is, you need to avoid that house of cards, that mishmash mess, especially as you grow. And one of the ways to do that is with the right naming architecture. And of course you can try to do that yourself. And there’s some tools out there through AI. If you were to do a CLA three prompt on naming architectures right for you and go through a series of prompts, you’d probably get some pretty good ideas. Or you can hire a professional naming firm that maybe has done this for 40 years and has done just about everything wrong. Unfortunately, more than once. But now we think we maybe know how to do it right, and we’re happy to help you.
