Branded house vs house of brands: what Succession can teach you

Your business made sense once. Now it is a thing only you can explain, which feels like control, right until the day you sell it or step back. That is a brand architecture problem, and it costs you most when you come to selling the business. It comes down to one choice: branded house vs house of brands, one brand or multiple brands. Succession‘s Roy family shows you how it ends if you never make it.

“I love you,” says Logan Roy, the ageing media mogul at the centre of Succession, “but you are not serious people.” He is talking to his own children, the ones circling his empire like gulls. It is the cruellest line in the show, and the truest thing anyone says about the family firm. That firm is Waystar Royco, a sprawl of television networks, theme parks and cruise ships. The Roys spend four seasons fighting over it. It was never run by serious people. It was run by whoever was winning that week. And it shows, because nobody, inside the company or out, can say in a sentence what Waystar actually is.

Why can’t anyone explain what your business does?

Your business is smaller and your family is saner. Just. But if a customer stalls halfway through explaining what you do, you have a touch of the same complaint. It has a proper name. Brand architecture. You once bought this, but were swindled with fonts and colours. Not your fault. Without an MBA in what real branding is, nobody could expect you to notice the foundational engineering was missing. And it turns on one question you have probably never sat down to answer. Are you a branded house, or a house of brands?

What is the difference between a branded house and a house of brands?

A branded house keeps one name over the door and makes everything earn its place beneath it. Virgin does this: Virgin Money, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Active, one swagger stretched across the lot. A house of brands hides the parent and lets each name fend for itself. Procter and Gamble sits behind Gillette, Pantene and Fairy, which you have used this week without once thinking of them. David Aaker, the strategist who put both on the map, asked the question every portfolio must answer. “What is the logic of that structure?” Yet most businesses never answer it. They simply accumulate, the way a loft does. The pile-up is what leaves everyone confused.

How does a business end up with too many brands?

Nobody sets out to build a house of brands. It happens the way Waystar happened, by saying yes. A good year buys a company. A pet project becomes a division. A founder’s name ends up on the masthead beside three acquisitions that have nothing to do with each other. Every yes was defensible on the day. Stacked up over a decade, they become a business that needs a diagram, a running commentary and a lie-down. Logan, man-child of the Roy empire, at least had a corporate jet to think in. You have a car park and the drive home.

And the sprawl is not free. People can only pass on a business they can describe, so the muddle costs you referrals. Buyers read confusion as risk, so it costs you on price. At sale, it sits in the valuation as the thing that might fall apart the day you leave. The mess looks like a presentation problem. It is a balance-sheet one.

Waystar Royco: a house of brands built by accident, the most expensive kind. Photo: @hdbernd on Unsplash

How does brand architecture affect selling your business?

Underneath the feud, Succession is about the thing it is named after. Who gets the empire when the old man goes. That question comes for you too, the day you sell, hand over, or simply stop. And it is nastier than it looks. After all, a buyer is not buying your charm or your years. They are buying what still works once you have left the building. On paper, AI could now do a good deal of your week. But AI cannot run a business nobody wrote down, and most of yours lives in your head. The data. The Rolodex. The client who pays on time only because they like you. None of that drops neatly into a cloud file.

We also found the same pattern in our own research. Our study, The Silence of the System, asked 123 senior leaders across New Zealand and Australia about this. Most who knew what to fix never got to it. The blocker was not belief. It was time: 63% named time and competing priorities. It is the same reason the business never got written down. Not that you did not know how, but that you were too busy succeeding.

So a buyer tours your business like a house with no floor plan. They open doors onto rooms that do not connect, and trim the offer as they go. Brand architecture is often the plan drawn in after the fact, over a building that grew without one. We cannot draw yours until we know whether the ensuite has to go, and whether to add the corridor that finally links it to the rest of the house.

One brand or multiple brands: which should a founder-led business choose?

For most founder-led businesses, one brand beats multiple brands. Make it a branded house. You spent years earning one good name. So make it work everywhere, and let a customer understand you before they finish their coffee. The catch is shared fate: if one part of the business has a bad day, the whole name wears it. A house of brands earns its keep in only two cases. When your offers truly serve different people. Or when one carries a risk you must keep away from the rest. That is the deliberate, well-funded Procter and Gamble kind of choice. It is almost never the one you should back into. Usually a product got its own logo in 2019 and nobody wanted the row.

A house of brands done on purpose: separate names, separate budgets, separate risks. Photo: @erikseth on Unsplash

Three questions to decide your brand architecture

You do not need an agency, a fortnight and a wall of coloured sticky notes. You need to answer three questions honestly, from your customer’s chair, not your org chart. What do you actually sell, in their words? What belongs under one name, and what has genuinely outgrown it? And where, right now, does someone trying to buy from you have to stop and ask what you mean? Sit with those and the answer is usually already there, somewhere in the business. The trouble is seeing it from the inside. Your team is clever and working all hours, but they live inside the business too. They know your industry cold, not why humans choose what they choose. That is a different job, and it is ours. That first honest look, from the customer’s side, is where DISTIL™, our way of listening, starts.

Branded house vs house of brands: common questions

Branded house vs house of brands: which is better for a founder-led business?

Usually a branded house. One hard-won reputation works harder when every offer shares it, because few teams can feed several separate brands the attention each one needs.

What is an example of a house of brands?

Procter and Gamble. It owns Gillette, Pantene and Fairy as separate names, on purpose, so each stands on its own with no obvious parent.

What is brand architecture?

Brand architecture is how the parts of a business sit together: one master name, a set of separate names, or a considered mix. Branded house and house of brands are the two ends of it.

Should your business have one brand or multiple brands?

One brand, in most cases. Every extra brand needs its own name, website, budget and attention, and a lean team rarely has spare of any. Add a second brand only when it serves truly different customers, or carries a risk you need to keep apart from the rest.

Does brand architecture affect what a buyer will pay for your business?

It can. A buyer pays for what still works once the founder has gone. When you are selling a business, a brand architecture nobody can explain reads as risk, and risk gets priced in. A clear structure, written down, is easier to value and easier to hand over.

When should you decide your brand architecture?

Before a naming moment forces it. Most businesses drift into a structure and only notice when a new product, a rebrand or a sale makes the muddle expensive.

Why it takes an outsider to see your business clearly

There is a catch to all this, and Ray Dalio put his finger on it in Principles: “The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.” It is your business, so you are the most biased person in the room about it. But that is not an insult. You simply cannot read the label from inside the jar.

It is the same hole every season of Succession turns on. Nobody in that room could say what the company was for without an angle. The Roys had bankers, lawyers and a man whose entire job was bad news. What they never had was one clear-eyed outsider who understood the business and wanted it to be well.

I am living the smaller version as I write this, repositioning my own practice with a parent brand above it. Turns out the advice is much easier to sell than to take.

That outsider is the chair we take at Good CX. Letting one into your business can feel exposing. We are there to help, not to judge. We look at your business the way your customer does, with no stake in which part wins. Then we help you decide what belongs together and what should stand alone, which is the whole of brand architecture. The call stays yours. But say you can feel the gap, or you have begun wondering what happens when you step back. Draw the plan now, rather than leave someone to inherit the mess. Fifteen minutes will tell you whether you have a real problem worth solving or a tidy-up. Bring the person who would run it without you. Serious people, making a serious decision. Finally.