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House of Brands vs. Branded House

Most businesses feel the pressure to grow sales by launching brand extensions and brand adjacencies.

Marty Neumeier is a smarty-pants marketing/advertising guy. He’s done lots and shared lots of great stuff in multiple must-read books. One of those must-read books is ZAG: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands (2006). In it, Marty shares enduring advice on strategically growing a brand.

As we marketers know, most businesses feel the pressure to grow sales by launching brand extensions and brand adjacencies. And after a few brand extensions and brand adjacencies have launched, marketers are left with managing a portfolio of brands. This is where Marty helped me to better understand the strategy of brand portfolio management.

Marty explains…

There are two main models for organizing brand portfolios. The first is a HOUSE OF BRANDS, meaning a company that markets a range of separate brand names (Procter & Gamble). The second model is a BRANDED HOUSE, meaning that the company itself is the brand, and its products or services are subsets of the main brand (Hewlett-Packard).

The advantage of a house of brands is that each brand is free to fight its battles on its own terms, unfettered by the meaning of the parent brand.

The advantage of a branded house is that all the products and services can share the same budget, customer, and market position.


Marty is indeed a smarty-pants marketing/advertising guy, eh?