Brand architecture is often misunderstood as an exercise about creating a diagram. Put all the brand assets on a page, create clusters, draw boxes, draft decision trees, and call it finished. While many of these are important processes and tools, they often miss the point of brand architecture: to make sense of a portfolio. And sense-making is as much about elegance as it is about structure.
Elegance becomes even more important when architecture is used to communicate externally, not just as an internal map. So how do you know when you’ve reached that level of simplicity? The test is simple. Can you say it in a sentence? A sentence demands clarity. It reveals clutter and forces the story to flow. If your architecture can’t survive that test, it won’t survive the marketplace.
Simplify to Clarify
BCG’s current brand architecture passes the sentence test:
BCG brings top-tier consulting and expertise that unlocks opportunity in every industry, with BCG X specialized in building the custom products and scalable software businesses need to grow.
Or even more simply, “BCG unlocks, BCG X builds.”
This clarity is a leap from the days when sub-brands—Platinion, Digital Ventures, Gamma—each delivered value but felt disconnected from the BCG whole. Complexity was baked into the structure. By uniting these under BCG X, BCG didin’t just tidy up. It made its story easy to tell, easy to remember, and easy to buy into.
For clients, the promise is clear: strategy and execution, under one roof. For teams, the identity is unified. For the brand, the architecture becomes not just an org chart, but a declaration of purpose.
Putting Consumer Value First
In the world of over-the-counter healthcare, it’s easy for brands to get lost in a sea of functionality. That’s why, for Vicks, the key to standing out wasn’t to explain more but to simplify.
Through a partnership with BCG BrightHouse, Vicks anchored its architecture in a simple, powerful insight, that when you’re sick, all you want is to feel normal again. This led to the overarching brand promise of “bringing people back to the glory of normal.”
But Vicks didn’t stop there. Instead of lumping all its products together, it structured them into two distinct categories: Power Brands like NyQuil and DayQuil that focus on fast, effective relief to restore the body, and Care Brands, like VapoRub and Pure Zzzs with soothing, sensory experiences that bring comfort and ease. Even while separated, each product is connected, by how they help consumers feel better.
The sentence:
Vicks brings you back to the glory of normal with power brands for multi-symptom relief and care brands for gentle healing.
When you look at a pharmacy shelf, you can see these two categories clearly come to life, creating a memorable picture in customers’ minds.
Putting it into Practice
Many organizations look at their portfolio of brands, grown from acquisition or entrepreneurialism, and would struggle to find a paragraph that describes it, let alone a sentence. Finding elegance requires three mindset shifts when approaching change:
01. Start with the end
Any change to brand will have some transition period. Have all stakeholders agree to look a the end picture first, then work out transition.
02. Think like a consumer
Larger organizations without strong brand teams will often find branding as a proxy for organizational influence. But customers don’t care.
03. Be bold
Our general tendency is toward loss aversion, and we often more clearly see the loss that change brings than the benefit. Don’t let this stop you.
Elegant brand architecture turns complexity into conviction. It makes your story travel faster inside the organization and land more clearly with the people you serve. In a crowded market, the brands that win are the ones whose architecture can be summed up in a single sentence—a sentence that employees can rally behind, that customers can repeat without hesitation. Because, in the end, clarity isn’t just nice to have. It’s the strategy.