You’ve got a new product. You’re counting on it to be a hot item. So you’ve devised a new brand identity to go with your new product: name, logo, look, message and materials. Beyond that, you’ve named and trademarked three innovative features of your product in order to further differentiate it from competition.

Sounds good, right? Not necessarily. You may be brand-happy. Brand-happy, the state of branding everything we touch, is so prevalent in business today that it’s seen as an automatic reflex of good marketing. But approached with aggregate business objectives in mind, building new brands may not always be a good business move. Before you decide to add and support a new brand in your marketing mix remember:

1. The premise. Customers are so bombarded by new products, features, services, companies and all of their messages and promises it’s becoming extremely difficult for them to tell one from another. Within many companies, even the sales force can’t clearly discern the products they’re selling!

2. The goal. Finding a unique spot in the customer’s mind, a solid, and distinguishable-from-competition area of the brain where you form an indelible impression.

3. The reality. You are selling to human beings, and homo sapiens—even with the most advanced craniums on the planet have the capacity to remember only a finite number of things. If you have a corporate brand, 12 product brands with eight unique features each and a story to support each, how much can you expect your customer to digest, let alone buy into?

4. The assumption. You do not have the financial resources to build multiple brands and accept the cost of their possible failure.

The cure for brand happiness? SIMPLIFY. Rule #1: there should be no more than two brand levels before the descriptor. Rule #2: your brand and business strategies should align. So, ask yourself this: is your audience buying your company or your product? Once you understand the relationship between them, make sure you have the right brand strategy: parent company is the brand (BMW), parent company becomes the endorser (Microsoft® Word) or product reigns supreme (Tide®, Cheer®, Gain® and Era®-all P&G laundry detergent products). Every company has a unique set of circumstances. We suggest critical choices be considered for the sake of marketplace clarity.

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