There is a specific kind of meeting that happens in large Indian conglomerates every few years. The CMO presents a brand architecture slide. It shows the master brand, a tier of endorsed brands, a tier of standalone brands, a collection of product brands with different naming conventions, and a handful of legacy marks that haven't been actively marketed since 2011. Everyone in the room knows it's a mess. Nobody knows what to do about it.
How Portfolios Get Complicated
Brand portfolios get complicated the same way organisations get complicated: one acquisition at a time, one product launch at a time, one market entry at a time. Each decision made sense in isolation. The problem is the accumulation — a portfolio that was never designed, only assembled.
The cost of a bloated portfolio is not just confusion in the market. It's internal. Marketing budgets get split across brands that don't have enough investment to build meaning. Salespeople can't explain what each brand stands for. Category managers are protecting turf. The master brand — which could be a genuine asset — gets diluted into a holding company name that no consumer identifies with.
"Brand architecture is not a diagram exercise. It's a decision about which brands you believe in enough to invest in — and which you don't."
The Courage to Retire
The conversation that unlocks brand architecture work is the retirement conversation. Which brands are you prepared to let go? Not sunset — retire. Actively wind down. Stop investing. There is almost always internal resistance: brand managers who've built their careers on those brands, sales teams who use them as a wedge in certain accounts, founders who have emotional attachment to names they chose themselves.
The MD's job — my job, in the MD chair across from a client — is to make that conversation possible. To show the cost of keeping everything and the opportunity of a portfolio built for the future. That's not a branding conversation. That's a business conversation. And it's the one that matters most.