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Making a $1.8b company greater than the sum of its parts
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Hey - I’ll be the first to admit that brand architecture isn’t a sexy topic. But bad brand architecture is a silent killer for many SME and Enterprise companies, because messy brand portfolios make it a nightmare for marketing teams to effectively promote their brands in a clear, consistent and compelling way. Morningstar, a $1.8b financial services company that provides global investment data, research and technologies, had a large portfolio that they were struggling to manage. A decade of acquisition-led growth resulted in:
New family brandsWorking with the central brand team, we reshaped the public face of Morningstar with a global brand architecture initiative that introduced six new family brands. Our new family brands - Morningstar Data+Analytics, Wealth, ESG, Credit, Retirement and Indexes - replace hundreds of overlapping product brands and serve as intuitive portals that help clients discover and engage with the product portfolio. Simplified PortfolioCross-selling and up-selling multi-product solutions was difficult because no-one agreed internally on what constituted a product, platform, or feature. We developed a single hierarchy and classification system for the portfolio that both employees and clients could easily understand. Global naming systemWhile on paper Morningstar followed a descriptive naming approach, in practice the various business units applied their own naming conventions and logic to their various products and services. We created a simpler naming process, along with new tools and guidance on developing a rich palette of potential names for future products. Competitive positioningLike many B2B companies, Morningstar would go-to-market with messaging and campaigns that over-emphasized product features and benefits over their clients’ problems and needs. Working with marketing teams inside the business, we positioned the new family brands around the needs of advisors, asset managers, institutional investors and issuers of securities, and the unique ways Morningstar could address them. Results
It might not be as exciting as a splashy brand campaign, but fixing a messy portfolio can deliver long-term results on the bottom line.
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Faisal Siddiqui
I'm the Founder of Creative Business Co. Subscribe for marketing guides, insights and deep dives.
Your brand lives in a deck. It should live in your business. Own the room 🎙️ • Most brand strategies live in marketing. • The strong ones live in sales, onboarding, and the product roadmap too. The line worth keeping: if your brand only shows up in campaigns, you don't have a brand strategy. You have a style guide. Use it the next time someone treats brand as a marketing job. 👉🏼 The 3 levels brand has to live in A brand idea has to be active in three places to build any real advantage. 1....
"We empower teams to transform operations." Nobody knows what that means. Own the room 🎤 • Most brand strategies describe what a company believes. "We empower teams to transform how they work." • Every competitor could say the exact same thing, which tells a buyer nothing. • A real brand idea describes how you compete, not what you believe. The test: if it can't tell you who your customer isn’t, it isn't a strategy. It's a mood board. Run that test on your own positioning before the next...
You're running ads nobody remembers. Here's why. Own the room 🎤 • An impression lasts hours. A memory lasts years. • Most B2B media plans buy a lot of the first and almost none of the second, then wonder why the spend isn't moving anything. • An impression is a moment of exposure. A memory is what makes a buyer think of you six months later, when the deal is real. Next budget review, ask which one each line is actually buying. What actually sticks 👇🏻 Memory forms through four things: Multiple...