Brand Arcitecture?

February 27, 2003 | 2 Comments

I had an interesting meeting yesterday down at the hospital. For those of you who don’t know, I am part of the Marketing and Communications / eHealth group and one of our high level priorities is to launch a new branding campaign. Well, yesterday we met with the design house that we’ll be working with, they were a very, very sharp group and I can’t wait to begin working with them. They’ll be doing the branding and print work and we’ll be working with them to tie it all in to the Web site.

Well, during the presentation they spoke about how they would be working on a “brand architecture” and that this would weave itself through the whole campaign. They mentioned how it could influence the navigation of the Web site, among other things. As we’ve done quite a bit of work nailing down the IA, conducting user research and the like I was very interested about this. I asked them about it and the quick answer I got was very interesting and surprisingly reassuring.

They talked about getting the organization to think of the brand outside of a standard org chart mentality and described the different audiences they would target, among other things. They also seemed very interested in what we had done. After a small bit of discussion, we came to realize that there was a good chance that our IA and user research work could very well line up with what they want to do in many ways. They scratch our backs and we scratch theirs kind of thing.

So now I’m wondering how brand architecture relates to information architecture? I mean it seems like there would need to be some connection there for both to be done successfully. What is more surprising is that some of the processes, exercises and methods to nail them down are very much alike. They use card sorting exercises, personas, etc.

I need to do some more thinking and learning on this, and I’d be very interested to hear any other thoughts, ideas, experiences y’all might have or any brand architecture resources that would be good for me to look at. It’s very interesting to me to say the least.

Filed under: Web General