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The Seductive Appeal of the Master Brand Concept
By Jayne Eastman, Managing Director,
Henry Rak Consulting Partners

Googling the term "master brand" generates 10,500 specific hits! As marketers we have passed with rapidity through simple Branding, to Brand Architecture, to "Master Branding." The appeal of the so-called Master Brand is obvious: take a large Brand and have it cover more categories and consumers, sweeping up volume through the power of Brand recognition and affinity, and generating great efficiencies and improved margins in the use of resources, human, financial, and operational. As Madkukar Sabravi notes, "The mantra for the future will be 'fewer is better." It's easy for marketers to be seduced by the Master Brand concept.

Except that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

Big, successful Brands extend into new, even adjacent categories and find that their share is inconsequential. The immediate assumption is often that the problem lies outside the marketers' control, for example, that the loyalty to competitive Brands is stronger than anticipated, or that competitive Brands employed effective counter-measures, or that retail conditions (price, shelving, distribution, assortment) are not optimized. Corrective action is then often focused on the tactical responses to these conditions. But both the cause and the cure are often strategic.

When the Master Brand strategy succeeds, it is because the Brand's central positioning has relevance across multiple consumer product or category requirements. For example, in working with the V8 Brand, we were able to identify a common need that crosses consumer targets and different day parts and then results in different product expressions tailored to each situation. The Master Brand is therefore positioned against the common benefit that meets this need, with the individual products positioned against the differing targets or day parts. In this case, V8 is creating a consumer understanding of the Master Brand that can be trusted to always deliver a given benefit, no matter where or to whom. The efficiency impact of this type of Master Brand strategy is enormous. Advertising can focus on the Brand level. The products essentially become proof points or reasons why to believe the overall Brand promise.

When the Master Brand strategy is not successful, i.e., when the Brand is unable to attain similar shares in new categories as in the original one, the cause is usually a misunderstanding of the benefit structure of the categories. In these cases, the marketers of these Brands have taken the trust consumers have placed in them and assumed that this trust will trump the way consumers organize their needs and the benefits they seek. In other words, they are asking the consumer to trust their brand despite a lack of clarity on how that brand will address their specific needs. An additional fallacy is assuming marketing halo across categories. Spending is reduced on existing products to fund the new "master brand" extensions because a Brand level impact is falsely assumed. The right corrective action is like that taken by our client, Tylenol. Tylenol originally extended the Trademark across multiple product types. However, the most important desired benefit of each of these product types is quite different. The original strategy sought commonality by focusing on a benefit that the brand possessed, but was far down the importance chain in one or more of the categories and so the Brand suffered with this "Jack of all trades" approach. Today, after a new and more granular understanding of its market structure, Tylenol has a new approach to Master Branding, based on positioning individual products against different needs and uniting the whole through a common and compelling Brand personality and imagery. Tylenol is creating an understanding of specific products that deliver unlike benefits through a Brand that can be counted on to always possess certain attributes critical to delivering these different benefits. The efficiency impact of this type of Master Branding is confined to halo effects, which, while not nearly so large as in the first case, can still be substantial. Advertising focuses on the product type level, with similar executional tone and manner. Individual product benefits are the main message and the Brand personality essentially becomes part of the reason why.

The mistake many marketers make is thinking that they have a choice in how they approach developing the Master Brand, and they don't. The structure of the market will dictate the right approach. The most powerful way to enter and grow in a market is to deliver, and be perceived to deliver, exactly the right benefits. Understanding how like or unlike the benefit structures are across categories - whether and how they can be linked - illuminates for a marketer the right approach to master branding. Clarity on the right approach to the Master Brand then leads to further clarity on the use of sub-Brands. The Master Brand concept is a powerful and appealing one, but one which is fraught with potential missteps and strategic errors To achieve optimal market performance, marketers need to start with a thorough understanding of how consumers organize their behavior across markets so that they are not seduced by the false attractions of the Master Brand concept.

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