The basic debate is this: In a company with multiple products or services, should each product or service have its own brand, or should every product’s identity be based off of the company’s central brand? (Virgin = Branding House; Georgia Pacific = House of Brands)
In Zag!, Neumeier says that it could be either, depending on the company’s strategy. A House of Brands gives safety and agility, because if one brand is bad or needs to shift its strategy, it can do so without disrupting the whole thing. A branding house, on the other hand, provides great synergy. There are tons of other pros and cons.
What do you think? Especially in church world, what should we lean toward? Branding House or a House of Brands?
Personally, I lean toward House of Brands, at least for our church. I think the agility it offers ministries is too great not to take advantage of. For example, our preschool environment, Waumba Land, can easily target its audience–preschoolers and parents of preschoolers–while our high school environment, InsideOut, is free to target its audience, etc. This has created more websites than you can possibly imagine, but each one lives with its target audience. As long as we do our job of informing the audience about the various web resources, I think we can be very successful with this system.
Also, I think that within the system of informing the audience, particularly newcomers, is where an overall brand can be very powerful. Whether through announcements or the web or information centers, you have to have systems and a solid, plainly communicated brand that can get new people in the loop AND get longtime members the info they need as well. Not an easy task.
But what do you think? What does your church do?
May 21st, 2009 at 8:10 am
This was a very hopeful post for me. I have always been so impressed with North Point’s incredible vision casting and commitment to a simple mission statement… but always wondered how it played itself out within the various environments. There are wins and goals and lots of different layers it seems for each separate ministry, yet everyone is true to the overarching mission/vision of the church. Your post helped me see how that can happen… as the “House of Brands” approach allows each environment to go after their specific target audience and create their environment accordingly under the umbrella of NPM’s vision/mission/strategy. I always knew you guys did this well… but this helped me understand the how and why behind it. Thanks!
May 21st, 2009 at 8:51 am
This is a great point Mike. It’s interesting how a church needs a sharp focused differentiated mission, but then it needs to live out that mission in very different environments speaking to very different types of people (adults, kids, women, men, etc).
Recently we did a rebranding project for the children’s ministry at NewSpring church in Anderson, SC - http://www.newspring.cc/kidspring . We took an approach that was somewhat a mix of these two. We created a unique brand identity for the children’s ministry (KidSpring), yet the brand architecture was structured so that it also closely tied to the parent brand of NewSpring church. It would be hard to pull the KidSpring brand into another church and still have it fit because it’s so closely tied to the parent brand.
Regardless of the strategy, it needs to be a strategy and not just “end up that way.” God calls us to bring order out of chaos and unfortunately many church brands can seem chaotic at times. A good, intentional brand architecture can help set things off with a solid foundation.
Thanks for posting Mike!
May 27th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
We go with a similar strategy, but we always try to explain each brand. I’ve found that people hate seeing a church bulletin filled with ambiguous names they know nothing about:
Oasis, Thursdays at noon
Wildfire, Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Axis, Saturdays at 9 a.m.
Who would go to any of those? If you don’t explain the catchy name, it’s pointless. So I try to incorporate a tagline into each brand that explains what it is and what the target audience is.
May 28th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
We have a similar concept with our logos, in that we have a different logo for each intended target; Women, Men, Teens, Children, etc. One thing that we do to tie them to the overall brand as a church is incorporate our “nike swoosh” if you will. That way each of our logos has an individual brand, however, it is also recognized to be part of the church as a whole. You can see what I mean here: http://twitpic.com/64guh
The church brand has a nice arch at the top, so we use that same arch concept in all the other logos to tie everything together.
December 17th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
interesting perspective.
i see in the future that the effectiveness of this type of marketing will change.
i do not automatically know what “next” is or “inside out”.
i cannot at a glance tell the difference between “starting point” and “next” or “connections”.
i think as church leaders we need to make it easy to know where to go and what to do. making people process branding is a potential road block to their understanding of what it is.
calling high school ministry “high school” for example.
the place where i should take my kids called “children” or “kids”
instead of calling it “starting point” having signage that says “start here”, “new to church”, “visitors” or “introduction to community groups” (interestingly i think we will begin using the one line description of what it is to name it).
it’s the same as calling the entrance an “entrance” using the color green.
my gut says this is a cultural distinction that will become more and more clear as time goes on. we are entering a season when people value a small amount of text to read - a couple words that are simple and obvious.