Planning

Sorting out the brand portfolio to drive business growth

Brand portfolios evolve. Businesses expand into new categories, launch new sub‑brands, acquire competitors and before long, what starts as a well-thought-out portfolio architecture becomes a messy patchwork. It’s all too easy to end up with a unintended mash‑up: a unified master brand covering a few brands here; endorsed brands over there; somewhere else, standalone brands with equity of their own; and maybe even own‑label offerings fighting for the same customer’s attention.

A clear portfolio architecture isn’t a nice to have. If there’s no organisation or logic there’s risk of diluting equity, confusing customers and consumers, burdening sales teams with conflicting direction, and potentially wasting money or making poor investment decisions. And from that come the intangible issues, an erosion of internal confidence and decision‑making that becomes bogged down, slow, political and tentative.

The question then is how to disentangle it all and get something that works in place.

It starts by recognising the problem: a clear, strategic portfolio architecture maximises both brand equity and business performance. When architecture is muddled:

Customers don’t understand your brands’ roles
Brands more easily cannibalise one another
Marketing spend can be wasted
Future NPD rationale gets murkier
Teams can’t prioritise with confidence

Next, an objective and systematic mapping of the current architecture

Speak with customers and consumers. Get an honest, visual map of how your brands are currently positioned. Plot them according to customer journey and decision drivers. What do customers actually think each brand stands for? How are they perceived not just individually, but together. Are the linkages known? Understood? Helpful or a hinderance?

What’s often revealed are multiple brands trying treading on each other’s toes, inconsistent endorsement logic, or brands that have outgrown their original purpose and now lie in no-man’s land.

Then, define brand roles with clarity

The key here is to get some intentionality behind the portfolio structure. Every brand in your portfolio should have a distinct role and is (classically) organised into a portfolio architecture

Unified Brand where the master brand leads all products – think Apple or Virgin.
House of Brands where individual brands have independent equity, think Mars or P&G
Endorsed Brands where sub‑brands get credibility from a parent but still stand alone – like Courtyard by Marriott or Sony PlayStation

And you don’t need just one approach. A hybrid will work fine if each brand’s role is clear and defensible. Is it clear on what customer need the brand serves that others don’t? Is it clear on whether the brand dilutes or reinforce the unified parent brand?

Time to act: rationalise, realign, reposition (other letters are available)

Once roles are clear, it’s time to prune and align. This might mean:

Consolidating brands with overlapping roles
Elevating or retiring brands
Re‑endorsing sub‑brands for clarity
Reallocating brand investment to strategic priority or driver brands

And finally, actively managing the portfolio

Errors or relapses happen when organisations lack brand governance. Establishing clear rules is always beneficial. Be clear:

what constitutes a new brand
when you endorse vs. when a brand can stand alone
what ‘distinctive assets’ are truly owned in your targets’ minds, so they can be nurtured and stewarded across different sorts of consideration or consumption moments.

And when you are brand planning, build in portfolio planning as a crucial first step.

Cleaning up a messy brand portfolio is not merely cosmetic, nor an intellectual exercise. It’s a strategic action that markedly helps to drive internal alignment, helps your business cut through market noise overall, helps sharpen customer understanding, and helps to direct investments against those brand priorities which need it. A well-oiled machine, if you will, not a patchwork quilt.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy, innovation and brand planning company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. Talk to us if you need a strategic diagnosis of your portfolio and an action plan that will drive meaningful commercial change.

david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2026.

Crow Chronicle, Autumn 2025

The Crow Flies was born out of a fusion of client-side commerciality and agency-side creativity… how could we fuse both to help brands impact the market, with pace and purpose?

We’ve helped many companies and brands do that since we started over 10 years ago. From food to Pharma, drinks to DIY; from H.E. to apprenticeships, leisurewear to homeware, our approach is always to connecting the world of your target customer to the leverageable strengths of your brand.

Here’s a reminder of our areas of focus across market research, strategy, innovation and planning, and some of the ‘caw’ approaches we take to help you brand or business have foundations of stone.

That’s the way to stop the endless cycles of strategic debate, to align everyone behind the mission and invest every precious penny on impacting the market.

Get in touch if you’d like to chat more about a knotty challenge or exciting opportunity.

QUICK LINK HERE: Crow Chronicle, Autumn 2025

Crow Essentials / Planning

Over the 10 years (well, 11 actually) we’ve been helping businesses, organisations and brands with their planning it never ceases to amaze us how often ‘planning’ is thought of as just a matter of templates and a timeline.

It’s simply not.

What you need is a well specified process that links critical growth insights with action; stakeholder involvement and alignment at the right moments, and above all, embracing the reality that only with sacrifice and ruthless focus can you can genuinely impact the market.

We’re really proud of our Hourglass Planning approach. If you need help with your planning, whether it’s for an organisation as a whole, a brand, or category get in touch to experience how a tight plan unlocks confidence and the belief in growth.

Crow Chronicle – unlocking the power of great plans

Ah, Crow Friends, please find attached for your delight and cawsome delectation this Spring’s Crow Chronicle, which this season is mostly focusing on plans and planning. Now, yes, here at Crow we are a brand building business, but creating great plans and much bigger than that. Whether it’s the plan for the whole business; a BU; a function or a brand portfolio or range, the power of a compelling plan, and the process that gets you there is often under-appreciated.

A great planning process aligns and unites the whole business. A great process not only delivers a plan that everyone then works to, but also drives engagement because of the confidence it creates.

A great plan focuses minds. Too often plans are flabby, unfocused and don’t talk to the key issues at play. The Chronicle offers a few tips and thought-starters for how to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Us Crows are absolute converts to the power of a great plan to drive a business positively forward. It takes effort, commitment, guts and no end of cat-herding, but get it right, and the domino effect you can create in the business will repay that investment in time and energy thrice over*

Enjoy the read!

Link here: Crow Chronicle on Planning

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*Yes, Crow said ‘thrice’ there. It’s a word that is not used often enough. Like ‘nuptials’, ‘egregious’, or ‘snollygoster’

Brand humility

When managing brands client-side, I used to advise every new starter in the marketing team to write down all their associations with the brand on their starting day, particularly so if they were new to the company, and keep it for future reference.

Because from that day forward, their immersion into a biased world would begin – both overtly, being professional and getting thoroughly up to speed with the brand, and tacitly, taking on (typically non-consciously) the cultural or group beliefs, myths, opinions and legends of that brand, like layers accreting one upon the next.

Much of the immersion is required to run the brand of course. And much is positive; after all, if a Brand Manager can’t champion a brand, who the heck can? But many of those layers – and it can be difficult to spot which – become biases or curved lenses which distort the truth. And distortions of the truth mean that you can’t easily stand back and have an honest, objective, critical awareness of the brand and how it’s really standing relative to the other players and competitors.

So view your brand with humility. Ensure that you are researching the brand well and researching it with dispassion and regularity, giving yourself the tools to more accurately wear your target consumers’ shoes, even if they do whiff a bit. Yes, publicly beat the drum; but privately be tough on the brand. That’s the path to making the best decisions.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2023

Hourglass Brand Planning

Brands only get built when the activity they implement is noticed and influences attitudes and behaviour of their intended.

Too often though, impacting the market falls down because brand strategy (assuming it exists) doesn’t get effectively translated through the process of a brand plan. And great brand plans require rigour and focus to get down to the one or two things that really matter to consumer and brand. It sounds easy, but it isn’t.

At The Crow Flies, we call our approach ‘Hourglass planning’ because it goes broad in the market analysis, then narrows to ensure everything is focused on delivering for the brand, before widening again as activities are defined and agreed.

However, whatever the shape or the name, there are key elements you really need to work through to develop a plan that will actually make the difference you want.

In the analysis, go broad, and go deep. You need to ‘hear’ the different opinions in your business to sort out which are relevant, which are opinion, and which need to investigated through your consumer research. You’ve got to be consumer focused, but you’ve also got to get the plan through internal stakeholders, so you need to really hear them and deal with their concerns (or ideas).

Choose what’s important. Don’t forget in situational analysis the human act of sensemaking. Research will illuminate and inform, not make the decision. Be prepared to use judgement to choose between competing options. You’re looking for company or brand strengths that are distinctive, defensible, ownable and leverageable, or competitor weakness that are the same. Boil it all down. Focus on the few enablers and blockers of growth because these will be at the heart of your action plan.

Be clear on who you’re competing for and evaluate and test everything through their lens.

Ensure you have long term foundations in place. Purpose, mission, vision are not interchangeable. You need to know the role of each and how it helps you make clear decisions that more often than not, are right. And don’t confuse brand purpose with social purpose.

Only have a small number of action platforms that flow directly out of the diagnosis. If you can’t see the insight threads from the diagnosis at the top of the process to the actions at the end, then your plan is likely misdirected, and you’ll struggle to get buy in and engagement.

Great brand plans sacrifice. Don’t confuse this with prioritisation. Too often, prioritisation is a pretence that some things are more important but, through sleight of hand, we can still do everything. You can’t. Kill stuff properly and just focus on what’s really important.

Brand activities that deliver against the essentials: we have yet to see an effective brand plan that does not deal with three themes: the brand’s ‘mental availability’, its ‘physical availability’ and bridge between the two, trial & repeat. The 4P’s fit here.

Our experience in brand planning is built from both client side and agency experience. If we can help you with your planning challenge, get in touch.

David Preston is founder of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. david@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1283 295100; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh.

Brand Planning

Don’t Slice Your Salami

I heard the expression ‘salami slicing’ a few years ago by someone describing the effect of small cost cutting steps on a product’s cost of goods, one then another, again and again, over a long period of time. Individually consumers didn’t notice, and research response was broadly neutral, so internally they got approved… again and again. But, fast forward a few years; now consumers have noticed the aggregate effect and have been slowly drifting away. And now, the stark reality of a poor product spiralling irreversibly downwards is a much bigger challenge.

Reflecting on this experience, it seems the lesson is more relevant than ever today. Brands are being battered on two sides; on the one hand, consumers prioritising value and price and switching to own label brands and discounter offerings; on the other, soaring cost of goods that aren’t easily passed on to consumers.

And time and again in our research, we’re seeing consumers increasingly suspicious of manufacturers and retailers, expecting them to cut product quality, or offer less, to make cost savings. They recognise it, but they’re certainly not happy about it

As a brand owner, what to do then? Faced with short term pressures to find ways to cut costs and continue to grow a brand, how can a marketeer achieve not undermine long-term brand strengthening and with it, a sustainable, profitable growth? Here’s what we’ve learnt through our research:

It may come as a surprise, but consumers are open to change on some product areas, so long as they don’t compromise its performance. Of all the Marketing ‘P’s’ – packaging materials and formats (Product ‘P’) are one that if done right can open up new usage occasions, new distribution outlets and even new audiences as well as providing an opportunity to improve a product’s carbon footprint at the same time.
Packaging design, whilst rarely the white knight in shining armour we’d like it to be, in combination with clever pack format changes, on-position refreshed design can really enhance brand perceptions
There are areas where you should never compromise – and most certainly Positioning. Ensure you are crystal clear what your brand stands for in consumers’ minds and what makes it distinctive from its’ competitors – this should be where your guardrails go up and the investment in dramatizing the positioning (communications for example) protected.
Don’t be tempted to grow your brand by product category stretch – this is a big risk with questionable returns and could easily result in ‘salami slicing’ your resource, your focus, and your product, sacrificing the core of what your brand stands for bit by bit, slice by slice.

If you’re looking for more insight in diagnosing how your brand is seen today, what the options are for the future and then what to do, do get in touch. We’ll help you resist the temptation to slice the salami ever thinner.

Gael Laurie is Brand Building Director at The Crow Flies, a research, brand strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. gael@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh.

Marketing responsibly

“What do you do?”

Having spent virtually my whole career in marketing you would think that when asked this question I would have my answer down to a quick, well, honed response. Instead, I used to say quite glibly “I make people buy things they don’t really need,” having learnt that trying to explain the ins and outs of what I do often results in polite vacant expressions and conversation soon moving on to another topic.

However, in today’s reality of the cost-of-living crisis coupled with climate breakdown my answer of old isn’t one that sits well with me, nor I imagine an ever-growing number of people, and neither should it. What, then, should be the answer to the real question of “What is marketing?” Or better “How do we do marketing responsibly?”

This isn’t about all brands having to have a “social purpose” – but about brand owners and retailers stepping up to ensure people can close the intention gap between wanting to buy sustainably and the reality of what they actually do or can afford.

As marketeers this is, something we’re adjusting to in the moment – still, here are 5 pointers to how we can be more responsible marketeers.

(1) Mean it. Really mean it. Most of us now agree with the science on human-accelerated climate breakdown and recognise the need to act, at pace and scale. But as a brand you’ve got to mean it. If you’re treating it as a tactic, or just sugar-coating a real lack of sustainable action, or if it’s just a way of sneaking out some new-news to attract some focus, then prepare to reap a poor harvest.

(2) Be honest and realistic about where you are and where you want to be. All companies and brands will be at different stages. Be honest about where you are today and confront the brutal truth about what it will take to change. You’re not alone. From talking to consumers in research two things stand out like sore thumbs.

Firstly, brands that are in catch-up and make a raft of sustainable claims without fully owning them get found out. Are they really substantiated? Are they what consumers want? Are they ownable and leverageable? Do they reinforce the positioning and associations consumers know of you? Rather than being an opportunity, it’ll be wasted effort.

Secondly, people want brands to do. You don’t have to solve the world’s problems in one go and no one is expecting you to. Tell people the journey you’re on, where you’re falling short and what you’re doing about it.

(3) Think of all your stakeholders. Ultimately, brands are created when your different stakeholder groups all know what you’re about. Your 30% plastic packaging reduction might shift the needle a touch, but the real win may be in corporate reputation, or a retailer being more willing to back you over someone who isn’t taking action. And this is important, because your immediate return on a sustainability investment may not add up in the short term – you’re going to have to evaluate it against your long-term brand and commercial goals.

(4) Keep it short, keep it simple, stand out. It’s always sobering, but vital, to remember how little people think about your brand, how little it actually means to them. Shopping is done in autopilot, the focus of attention is elsewhere and the world of sustainability – a complex and confusing soup of claims and strange terms, and sadly, hype – makes it even more difficult. Whatever you do needs to be easy to makes sense of, fast. It needs to be consistent against what consumers already know about you. Declutter your pack. Focus on what’s important. Shout it, don’t whisper it.

(5) It’s about ‘and…’ Again and again in research we’re hearing that people don’t want to have to compromise, be it on product quality, convenience, or their favourite brands unless they really have to. But this isn’t about fitting a round peg into a square hole – the ultimate act of marketing responsibly is to see that being sustainably offers us new ways to deliver what consumers want, but better and with fewer negative impacts…. if we’re willing to embrace the challenge to get there.

The Crow Flies are presenting at the Soil Association Organic Trade Conference on 19^th October, including on themes of greenwashing and marketing sustainable products during the cost-of-living crisis. If your brand is facing these challenges, do get in touch.

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Gael Laurie is Brand Building Director of The Crow Flies, a research, strategy and innovation company that helps brands find a direct route to long lasting success. gael@thecrowflies.co.uk; +44 (0) 1889 725670; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh. © The Crow Flies, 2022

The Perils of Penny The Pen Portrait

Bringing to life your target consumer or customer in a way that’s useful and meaningful to your marketing efforts, whilst also acting as an empowering guide in the business is a big question. It’s one we face a lot on many projects from research, positioning and often business strategy too.

It’s an really important question too. Bringing to life consumer segments effectively can focus the business and aid execution and commercial delivery. But too often we reach for the ‘Pen Portrait’ solution – you know, ‘Penny’ or ‘Ethan’, ‘Sanjit’ or ‘Olivia’.

The principles of targeting are well established (if debated and not always agreed with) but whatever your view on it, it’s always a big mistake to confuse ‘targeting’ with ‘micro-targeting’ which is what frequently happens. Targeting can be empowering, but micro-targeting can give the perception of being focused whilst actually restricting your commercial potential. So it’s important to tread carefully…. we see five traps that can catch the unwary marketeer:

Too personalised or over specified. This is trap we most often see. By making something very individual (‘This is Dan, he’s 28, lives an apartment in Greenwich with his partner…’) the receiver’s decoding of the targeting becomes personal (He’s not like any Dan I know) and may have the opposite to intended effect – making it unrelatable. The idea of the Pen Portraits here is find a central representation of the target group, but in making it too personal the opposite happens and the target narrows and becomes too singular – when you go out looking for the target you can’t find them.
Too broad. Breadth is, counter-intuitively, important in targeting. You want to find a meaningful commercial prize to aim at after all. But too broad becomes useless. Millennials anyone? Yes, that’s right! Let’s assume every one of the 14 million “millennials” in the UK share the same attitudes, characteristics and behaviours. It’s lazy and worse, largely useless in helping a brand.
Too stereotyped which may have initial appeal inside the business, but when you actually try and recruit, you find it’s hard to find your targets. The hidden biases inherent in identifying may have some very broad-brush recognition from the audience but in the detail they’re not there – in reality, people just don’t fit the mould.
Too unrelatable – a big challenge when you have a business that isn’t particularly customer or consumer orientated. Leadership can often feel that they represent the customer. You need a strong argument and commercial case to dislodge these deep set opinions. And some bravery too – hence, teams often roll with it a bit or don’t nip the problem in the bud at source.

There isn’t a perfect answer but equally, there’s no doubt that building up a set of target audience typologies is useful for helping the business (and decision makers in particular) be clear on who we’re going after, who we’re not, and why. But what’s important in the Pen Portrait is likely to vary by category and you may need different elements depending on your category or brand situation. For example, although broad, life stage may be discriminating for you. Or, perhaps, you want to target everyone but only on specific occasions or moments.

We’ve bags of experience working out through research who to target and how to best bring them to life and set them to productive work in a business. If we can help you with your targeting, drop us a line.