Managing Brand Architecture – The Impact of Corporate and Product Brands

The complexity of brand portfolios has considerably increased within the last few years. This raises important challenges for many corporations. In this context, the current state of brand architecture research lacks answering issues of high importance. Thus, the authors develop an approach to empirically investigate the perceived brand architecture of different companies. With the help of a large dataset of 2,949 cases the paper investigates the behavioral relevance of corporate and product brands in customers’ point of view. As a result, it was shown that corporate brands as well as product brands have a behavioral relevance across industries. Differences in the perception of the brand architecture can especially be explained by the perceived scope of the product and service portfolio the corporate brand.