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If you’re planning to create several related brands, you need to choose the brand architecture that establishes how they’re related. You have two options:

 Branded house (monolithic) consists of a master brand (usually, a company) with multiple subbrands (typically, divisions, product families, products, or services), all of which ride the coattails of the master brand. Virgin has several subbrands, including Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Comics, Virgin Wines, and Virgin Care.

 House of brands (freestanding brands) consists of several stand-alone companies, product families, products, or services, each with its own brand identity, none of which refers to the corporate brand. Proctor & Gamble has a wide variety of consumer brands, including Bounty, Charmin, Gillette, Puffs, and Tide.

Most organizations and people use branded house architecture because it offers the following benefits:

 Easier and more affordable: You build and manage a single brand.

 Stronger: Everything you offer reinforces a single brand. Another way to look at it is that you don’t have a bunch of separate brands that dilute the master corporate brand.

 Increased brand equity: A single brand generally has more equity built into it and is easier to sell. With multiple brands, a prospective buyer of the business may want some brands and not others, and will expect to pay less for the business as a result.

Here are a few situations in which the house-of-brands architecture may be the better choice:

 You have deep pockets and a large corporation with diverse companies, divisions, or families of products or services.

 You want to introduce a new product to the market that would dilute or clash with your existing brand’s identity. Suppose that an automobile manufacturer that built its brand around luxury vehicles decides to offer a line of economy vehicles. Selling economy vehicles would weaken the company’s reputation for designing and building luxury vehicles, so creating a stand-alone brand probably would be best.

 You build or are planning to build a company by acquiring multiple stand-alone brands.

A key factor in successful branding is consistency, so if anything you’re introducing to the marketplace is inconsistent with your existing brand, consider creating a separate, stand-alone brand around it.