Rethinking brand architecture: a study on industry, company- and product-level drivers of branding strategy

Purpose This study aims to compare academic prescriptive models on how to choose a branding strategy on the continuum from a "branded house" to a "house of brands" with real-life branding strategies of leading companies. Design/methodology/approach Data from an executive survey, observations, and desk research on 75 leading companies in Austria are analysed with multilevel WLS regression. Findings Branding strategies for products are determined by industry (23% of variance), the overall strategy of the company (28%), the remaining variance being product-level decisions deviating from both. Service and consumer durables companies lean more towards corporate branding than consumer nondurables. On the company level, synergies in advertising, e-commerce and e-CRM increase the usage of shared brands. A higher company age leads to brand proliferation. On the product level, quality differences between products, the emphasis on and differences in experiential product positioning, and, marginally, the symbolic differences between products favour individual brands. Research limitations/implications Future research should investigate additional markets, additional drivers, SMEs and employ additional measures. Practical implications The study informs brand-architecture audits with benchmarks from leading companies, calls for a view of brand architecture more flexible than ideal-type categories proposed in literature and cautions against management inertia, industry standards and trends in designing branding strategies. Originality/value This study is the first quantitative cross-industry multi-level study on real-life branding strategies. It also applies a new conceptualisation and measurement of branding strategy.