Brand overlap detector tool

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Question: why should I assess the overlap between my brands?

Answer: to understand whether you are maintaining too many brands, and therefore potentially confusing the market, diluting communications investment, and incurring unnecessary costs

Key action points

Developing and maintaining brands is expensive. It is estimated that it costs around $US 50 million a year to maintain a global brand.

For a number of reasons, organisations tend to accumulate an ever-increasing portfolio of trademarks and brands over time. Many of these are mere trademarks (i.e. they have no meaning in the market) or weak brands (they have very limited meaning), and these weak brands will typically have a significant overlap with the more significant brands, saying little more than “we are cheaper” or “this is for Product Y not Product X.”

To maintain superfluous brands is to incur a number of problems:

1. using several brands in the market place for more or less the same proposition is to focus the potential customer on their differences more than on their advantages. “What is the difference between Brand X and Brand Y, when they seem to be offering the same thing?” Two or your brands should not make the same fundamental proposition
2. investing in several brands, when one brand would suffice, is to waste a lot of that investment, and to discount the impact that investment would have if it were focused on just one brand
3. there is a raft of incidental expenses to maintaining a brand, from legal protection to internal accounting. With each additional brand, those expenses increase exponentially

Therefore, as an early step in understanding whether you are maintaining too many brands, you can examine the meaningful overlap between your brands. If your main brand more or less says it all, and the rest of your brands serve only to repeat that proposition with minor variations, then you should consider rationalising your brands.

Using this tool, you may well highlight the opportunity to rationalise tens of your brands in an afternoon.

In more detail ….

This Brand Overlap Detector tool is designed to understand your main brand, and then to highlight where, and if, others of your brands add value to the customer over and above the proposition of your main brand.

If your additional brands are making fundamentally different propositions to your main brand which are valuable to potential customers, then there is a prima facie case for keeping them, and even investing more in them.

If, on the other hand, they say nothing new or different when compared with the main brand, there is a prima facie opportunity to consider rationalising them.

This tool takes you through the following steps:

• Step 1
• name the main brand and the additional brands you wish to evaluate

• define your main brand

• define your additional brands
• identify any customer added-value of each additional brand over the main brand
• score the strength of that additional added-value

• review the results

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