Lexus and Toyota. Banana Republic and Old Navy. Ritz-Carlton, Marriott and Springhill Suites. Multiple brands within the same brand family, often exhibiting a tiered approach, offer companies the ability to capture a wider range of customers by catering to a variety of unique consumer needs, preferences and budgets. Each brand within a portfolio serves a distinct role for a specific audience, allowing companies to target various customer segments without alienating others. But before letting brands hit the market, it's important to ensure that each brand within the portfolio has a clear brand identity, not only to resonate with specific consumers, but to avoid internal competition, or as some marketers call it, “cannibalism”.
Last year, one of Mythic’s Fortune 500 clients in the home services space asked us to rebrand their “mid-tier” offering. Known as a premium brand in their category, this client needed to establish a more modest brand in their portfolio as a standalone brand in its own right, as opposed to “a cheaper version” of the parent brand (a prime risk for cannibalization, eating into the sales of the premium brand.) However, the question always arises when attempting to differentiate brand identities within a brand family: How much DNA from the parent brand do we inject into the value brand? How do we harness the credibility of our parent brand without sacrificing its brand equity, and at the same time, step out of its shadow and define the mid-tier brand?
Stakeholder interviews within the portfolio
The first step in approaching this challenge was to interview employees whose roles straddle both the premium brand and the mid-tier brand to determine the challenges and any perceptions the brand needed to overcome. This is also an opportunity to ask questions that help us identify and define distinct personality traits of the mid-tier brand.
Throughout all of our conversations about this brand, our client found it difficult to pull apart the premium and mid-tier brands, through no fault of their own (the products do, after all, share the same core engineering principles and performance guarantees). But, with the information we’d been given, we were heading straight toward cannibalism territory.
Client workshopping with competitive and audience research
Our next step was a virtual, interactive workshop with the client team. Our team went in knowing we had to keep the team engaged, and refused to accept “the two brands share the same DNA” as an answer. We came prepared with a messaging audit of how other brands in the category talk about their premium offerings versus their lower-tier offerings to identify opportunities and white space.
Our research indicated that audiences are not solely influenced by price when making a significant purchase for their home. Instead, they seek the best quality that meets their needs at a fair price. After layers of probing questions, we arrived at differentiators between the parent brand and the offspring, as well as differentiators from the rest of the category. We also established in that workshop which key strengths and elements we wanted to leverage from our parent brand.
Identify clear ownable roles within the category and portfolio
The resulting brand didn’t try to win on being budget-friendly, rather, we went on offense in a category that tends to lean defensive when positioning less-costly options. We built this mid-tier brand’s positioning by leveraging the trust and premium engineering of our parent brand, but with only the best of homeowners’ must-haves, without the up-selling nice-to-haves. We treated the parent brand as just that, a parent. Taking about 50 percent of the DNA from our premium parent, our brand framework still created space for the offspring brand to come into their own, with messaging pillars and a personality and tone that provided clear swimlanes for each brand to own.
Families are complicated, and brand families are no exception. But when you take the time to make each brand distinct yet connected, you’re able to leverage one another’s brand equity in powerful ways that allow your customers to make the right choices for themselves without worrying about a brand relative eating your lunch — or each other.
Mythic creates strategies that drive growth and foster meaningful connections. By blending data, creativity, and deep consumer insights, we help businesses navigate challenges and seize new opportunities. We partner with clients to craft bold, impactful solutions that deliver results in an ever-changing world.
Ready to elevate your brand? Discover more at Mythic.us or reach out to newbiz@mythic.us to get started.
