Emerging with the right brand strategy.

For emerging companies, it’s familiar territory. Many enter the business fray with two brands—corporate and product—that are not necessarily linked by message or image. Typically, they choose to strongly promote their product brand right out of the gate, often with the kind of success that leaves the corporate brand in the dust.

As time passes, customers know the company by name as the “xyz product brand,” not its corporate brand. In business-to-business marketing, a sales force in this scenario is likely to sell what customers are most familiar with, the product brand, thus exacerbating the situation. What’s more, evolutions in product brand technology often lead to additional product brands or brand extensions.

OK, so now it’s time to introduce a new product brand into the mix. What to do?

Starting off with the self-imposed complexity of promoting two brands can lead to serious brand restructuring down the road. It’s not always realistic to expect that a company, early on, would look well enough into its future to determine the long-range business ramifications of its brand strategy. Inevitably, if you’re on this path, you’ll soon have to make some brand strategy decisions for the long-term viability of your brands and your business. Remember, the goal is to send clear, concise and consistent messages in order to own unique real estate in the minds of your customers.

There are no right or wrong answers; just good questions that can help you get there. What do my audiences perceive? What do our brands stand for? How much equity do we have in our brands? What is the long-term strategy for the business? Does our definition of business encompass future product/technology advancements? Is the market for all products the same? What are our competitors doing? And so on.

Once you’ve completed your self-analysis, here’s a broad, simplistic view of brand strategy directions you might take:

Get monolithic. A monolithic strategy places its marketing firepower on building a single “master brand.” Normally this means the corporate brand gets the emphasis with product brands treated as generic extensions. Think of BMW in the consumer world as representative of this direction.

Leverage through endorsement. An endorsed brand strategy, which can take many forms, dictates that you leverage your corporate and product brands. Normally this means endorsing the product brand with the corporate brand by including it with the logo mark or other device, e.g., (product) brand by (corporate) brand.

Isolate your brands. A branded strategy promotes individual product brand(s) and leaves the corporate brand out of the promotional equation. This is commonly used in the B2C world when products can be differentiated by differing needs and wants of targeted audiences. Proctor & Gamble offers many examples of this. Unfortunately, companies without the resources of P&G often fall into this strategy without realizing it, developing distinct and not always productive autonomous brand messages and images for each of their product brands.

Where has your corporate brand gone? It all depends on where you wanted it to go. Or where you let it go.