The Power of Sub Branding, and how you can leverage it!

As a company, building your brand is something you have to work on consistently. There are always hopes for growth, success, and achievement. In today’s landscape, building a brand that resonates with people, forges loyalty, and solves a problem is a driving force for a company’s success. However, though growth is a powerful thing for business, it brings into question the structuring of your Brand “House”. Will you build new identities that connect to a universal “parent” brand, or create a variety of smaller entities, each with their own distinct personality?

The more your organization develops, the more you’ll need to think about sub-branding, and how it relates to your brand architecture. Companies with sub brands can access a broader range of customers, newer niches and categories!  But let’s get into figuring out whether sub branding is the right move for your company, and more importantly, where can you begin building the foundations for a sustainable brand architecture. The Wit Agency, one of the top branding agencies in Pune, is here to help!

What is Sub – Branding?

Sub brands are related to a parent brand, and both support and benefit from that parent. Sub brands tie back to the parent brand’s qualities, values, and message, while also having their own unique qualities.

Amazon, for example, has multiple technological products, such as Prime Video, Amazon Fresh, Prime Music, etc. These products are branded as Amazon and promote the parent brand. Amazon is not a product itself, but each sub brand takes advantage of Amazon’s brand equity, and releases different products to cater to many consumer segments.

Good sub brands can be either explicitly connected, or only tangentially related to the parent brand. However, in almost all cases, the aim is to provide successful companies with a new way to build stronger bonds with their existing customer base and expand into new revenue streams at the same time.

While there are some larger brands that create sub brands that are completely different from the parent brand, standard sub branding has various unifying factors that are common within all of the brands created by the same “parent” company, such as the:

• Messaging.
• Colour palette.
• Typography.
• Imagery.
• Marketing campaigns.
• Logo.

However, this is still freedom to experiment based on the niche audience’s needs and wants. Excellent sub brands serve a very niche audience and customer base.

Is sub branding right for your Business?

Business conditions keep changing. There might come a time where you’ll need to expand and pivot to meet the market expectations. And sub branding can be a way to do that. Traditional sub branding world best with organisations that have created a name for themselves in their chosen field. Creating a smaller sub brand, you can simultaneously expand into different niches, while relying on your current identity to give your new creation the boost it needs. After all, it’s much easier to build on an existing entity than to start the brand-building process again from scratch.

Sub branding can increase the exposure for both your parent brand and new brand, reaching out to old and new audiences and refreshing your customers’ memory on your products or services. While there are a lot of positives attributed to sub branding, it is also a big move to make. Companies invest a lot of capital in creating a new identity for the sub brand, and making sure both pools of customers are satisfied and happy. If a company does not have the bandwidth to handle an influx of customers, it can lead to tarnishing the reputations of the parent and the sub brand.

How you can create your Sub Brand?

Good sub brands aren’t just an avenue to new user personas and revenue sources. When used correctly, these creations can help to make a parent brand more appealing too, by giving businesses a way to engage a section of their audience that previously had no interest in the company.

Some questions to ask while brainstorming your sub brand:

• Who is my target audience? Are they different from my normal customers?
• Would my audience connect with a new sub brand?
• What need / problem am I solving?
• How do I connect my sub brand to my Parent brand?

These questions are a great start to figuring out the details of your sub brand.

Our client, Krios Info Solutions, wanted to create sub brands based on the technology solutions they were providing: PoultryOs and DairyOS.

Through a lot of brainstorming, we helped Krios figure out the details and message these sub brands will be putting out, how it would connect with their parents brand and the campaigns they wanted to run.

Plan your expansion and sub brand carefully so that there is no confusion between employees and customers. The Wit Agency is here to help out with any re-branding needs!

The Wit Agency, one of the top branding agencies in Pune, specializes in Sub-branding.

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