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.

Building a business or brand means mastering the language

In every organisation, people talk constantly — in meetings, emails, ‘decks’, and WhatsApp groups or Teams threads.

Beneath the endless words lies a simple truth: that the language a business uses determines how it thinks, acts, and decides. It builds and reaffirms culture. Consistency in language and naming isn’t about semantics or brand pedantry – it’s a cultural amplifier and a strategic tool in your armoury. When fuzziness, odd abbreviations and jargon kick in, clarity reduces and misalignment creeps in. When clarity is there, everything feels sharper, faster, and more unified.

Fragmented language, fragmented focus

It’s likely that you’ve sat in a meeting where on the surface everyone seems to agree, but everything quickly falls apart when the same word means different things to different people. Is the ‘customer’ the end consumer, the buyer, or the internal customer? Is a ‘launch’ a full market release, a pilot or a test-and-learn? Is a ‘proposition’ a strategic platform or a tactical offer? Misalignment on terminology creates more than just confusion; it removes precious pace. Agility becomes wading through mud. Teams hedge their bets, double-check interpretations, layers of ‘check-ins’, pre-alignment meetings, or waiting for clarification before making progress. Momentum evaporates.

Inconsistent language also breeds indecisiveness. If leaders can’t agree on the meaning of core concepts then discussions become circular. People talk about the work instead of doing it. The energy that should go into execution gets swallowed by the effort to decode what others really mean. It’s inefficiency on steroids.

At its worst, this misalignment creates a cultural drag. When words lose coherence, so does confidence. People start to feel bogged down, unsure which version of the truth is “real.” The organisation becomes a place of interpretation rather than action. Meetings are confused with getting stuff done. Ploughing through e mails is seen as productive.

Language aligns, momentum multiplies

Conversely, when language is consistent, agreed and bought in to, something powerful happens: clarity compounds. Teams move faster because they share the same mental model. A common vocabulary builds shared understanding. Shared understanding builds trust.

When a business has consistent naming conventions for its initiatives, products, and internal frameworks, it projects coherence both internally and externally. Employees can talk about their work with pride and precision. Customers and partners feel that same consistency as confidence. The organisation’s story hangs together. Sacrificing the unimportant becomes easier. Priorities can be focused on, rather than argued over.

Language alignment also reinforces culture. Words signal values. When everyone refers to things the same way it shapes how the organisation thinks about itself and its purpose and over time, that shared lexicon becomes a kind of cultural shorthand. It’s not just what people say; it’s how they belong.

Sharper language, sharper thinking

Consistent language sharpens corporate thinking. A disciplined vocabulary encourages disciplined thought. When terms are defined clearly, strategy becomes clearer too. You can’t discuss “growth” for a business or a brand if no one has agreed whether that means revenue, margin, reach, depth of impact or market share.

Language also drives tactical alignment. Consistent naming of processes, roles, and deliverables allows teams to collaborate seamlessly. It reduces cognitive burden, people don’t have to waste time translating corporate jargon that varies from site to site, location to location. The result: faster, more confident decisions.

Building a shared vocabulary takes intention

Of course, consistent language doesn’t happen by accident, it requires leadership attention. Someone has to own the glossary whether that’s through brand governance, internal communications, or a centre of excellence. Key terms should be documented, explained, and reinforced in a conscious, loose-tight way.

And, it’s about listening…. the best corporate language grows from how people actually talk and work, not from what’s imposed top-down. If that natural rhythm is tuned into and formalised, the organisation can find a voice that is authentic and real.

In a world where businesses and brands often unwittingly chase complexity, the winners will be those that master simplicity, and that starts with the words they choose to use.

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

The answers! 🎄

Crow has had a very fine dinner of Roasted Worm, Mealy Grub Jalousie with a side order of Peri Peri Twigs – delicious.

And given that Crow’s live in a ‘murder’ we have no time for Kings and Queen’s and all that. Up the Crowpublic!

But you’re not here for this tittle-tattle, you’re here for the answers! Of course you are.

Here they are…

Crow’s Christmas Puzzle ⬇️

Crow’s Christmas Brand Mashup ⬇️⬇️

Crow’s Christmas Fun!

Crow-Ho! Crow-Ho! Crow-Ho!

Yes, yes, Crow Friends, you asked and we’ve responded.

You said, “We need more Crow Christmas Puzzles!” WE ANSWERED!

You said, “We need more Crow Christmas Brand Mashups!” WE ANSWERED!

Here they are in all of their Crow glory

Crow’s Christmas Puzzles ⬇️

There are 15 Christmassy / Christmas-adjacent brands and each has a year associated with it’s founding or launch. Work them out and then put them order from furthest in the past to the most recent. And here’s the thing…. WE’VE GIVEN YOU THE ANSWERS! Well, sort of.

Crow’s Christmas Brand Mashups ⬇️⬇️

Of course you love the daily #brandmashup. Who doesn’t? But these are that bit extra special because they’re all festive. You know what to do Crow is sure – just work out the separate components and then mash them together to form a whole – each one is a brand which is in some way associated with Christmas.

Enjoy, enjoy!

Answers, as is traditional, will be published at 3pm on 25.12.2025 on Crow’s intrawebthingy at http://www.thecrowflies.co.uk

And also for those of you on the pulse of all things social, INSTA / FB @thecrowfliesltd

A DM may result in a generous clue if you ask very nicely!

Generation Generalisation: Targeting by Generation Does More Harm Than Good

Business people love to target by ‘Generation’. ‘Gen Z’, ‘Millennials’, ‘Gen X’, ‘Gen Alpha’ have all become convenient shorthands for talking about audiences. Like calling a child ‘naughty’ these labels are quick short hands with long term consequences. Generational tags hold the promise to make segmentation simple, offering tidy demographic boxes that allegedly explain how people think, behave or buy stuff.

For business people who love to tacitly play bullshit bingo, talking about “Gen Z” is another strategic amplifier – it makes board table conversations sound insightful and current. And frustratingly, the media pick up on this too… ‘work shy Millennials’; the ‘Burnout Generation’ and so on. Together the illusion is formed that age alone defines people’s outlook and choices.

The problem is, it’s not only lazy, more often than not, it’s factually wrong.

Three Big Problems

Firstly, generational labels ignore the immense diversity that exists within any age cohort. Treating Gen Z as a single segment assumes that a 22-year-old graduate in Manchester and a 22-year-old care worker in Cornwall share the same motivations and media habits — when they almost certainly don’t.

Secondly, these generational labels are always applied out of context. ‘Baby Boomer’ was first used in a 1963 article in the Daily Press. Gen X from a 1991 novel by Canadian, Douglas Coupland. Gen Alpha in 2008 by Australian researcher, Mark McCrindle. So how are these sweeping generalisations relevant to someone in Barnsley, Crief or Newtonards?

Thirdly, there’s chicken and egg – this kind of targeting reinforces stereotypes and inherent biases. Older audiences are portrayed as brand loyal and tech illiterate. Young adults as work shy and low on attention. With these lazy generalisations the curiosity and connection with real people is lost and the tone of a business or brand becomes to objectify and talk down to the very audience it’s trying to engage with.Fourthly, people’s choices are far more influenced by what they can afford, the beliefs they hold, and what matters to them that when they were born.

Four Solutions

Segment by mindset, not year; identifying common attitudes, values, and needs across age groups.
Use rich contextual datato understand what people actually do, rather than assuming how they act based on their age.
Recognise fluid life stages. Someone renting their first flat or planning for retirement can belong to any generation.
Designing inclusively, so creative and messaging are accessible and relevant to all who share a motivation, not just those who share a date of birth.

How to Persuade Others

Challenging generational stereotypes takes tact, particularly because these labels are sticky. Start by using evidence, not opinion, facts not myths. In the UK we have research data from ONS, IPA or WARC, or indeed your own bespoke research, showing that attitudes differ more by income, education and worldview than by age.

And it’s important, because these beguiling clichés lead to lower opportunity. Understanding audiences as people, not categories, makes brands more inclusive, more empathetic, and ultimately more effective.

But more than this, the real irony is that in generalising by Generation, the opportunity becomes smaller not larger for brands. If you’re clear on your audience by attitude, beliefs and by simple economics, you open a bigger field of play and a bigger size of prize.

Brand Positioning: pursuing Radical Simplicity

It seems marketeers love models: “pains and gains”, “brand compass”, “archetypes”, and use terms like ‘position’ / ‘promise’ / ‘proposition’ / ‘benefits’ / ‘values’ interchangeably. Endless boxes to fill, to make everyone look clever.

Uncomfortable but true: the best brand positioning isn’t about adding layers, it’s about stripping them away.

At its core, brand positioning boils down to three things:

Who’s the target?
What’s the poorly-met need?
What’s the compelling yet simple promise we can make?

Brand positioning – pursuing radical simplicity

That’s it. If your audience can’t call you to mind and explain your brand in one sentence, you haven’t simplified enough.

And in an age of media fragmentation, whether it’s social feeds, TikTok, podcasts, multi-channel TV, multi-screen viewing, simplicity isn’t optional, it’s survival. Complexity gets lost. Sacrifice and clarity cut through.

Storytelling? Powerful, yes. But stories are the vehicle, not the engine. Without a radically simple positioning at the core, your stories scatter, not stick.

The brands people remember are the ones they can describe in five words, not five frameworks.

Radical simplicity isn’t dumbing down….it’s sharpening up.

Burst the bubble: your brand isn’t important

Most people don’t think about your brand. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not even when you’re launching that campaign you’ve been working on for six months.

It can be a hard truth for brand builders and marketeers to hear, especially for senior stakeholders who live and breathe the brand every day. But it’s also the most liberating, powerful realisation you can have. Because when you stop assuming your brand is front-of-mind, you start seeing it through the eyes of real people. And that’s where better thinking begins.

The brand bubble is real
Inside most businesses, especially at leadership levels, the brand looms large. It’s the topic of internal presentations, strategy sessions, workshops, and debate. Over time, it becomes a self-reinforcing loop: the more you talk about the brand, the more important it feels. Soon, there’s a risk that decisions are made based on internal opinion, not external reality.

This is the brand bubble. And the only way to burst it is to re-anchor yourself through humility. To get real about how little time the average consumer spends thinking about your brand, and how low down their priority list it usually sits.

Why this is good news
At first, this might feel deflating. But it’s actually a good thing. Because when you realise your brand isn’t a daily obsession for most people, you start asking the right questions.

Instead of “what do we want to say?”, you ask “what will work in their world?”

Instead of “how do we get them to love us?”, you ask “how do we become useful, easy to choose, or more memorable?”

Instead of obsessing over tiny tonal shifts or logo placement, you focus on what truly matters to the people you’re trying to reach.

When the pressure to somehow be profound lifts, clarity emerges.

Proximity distortion
Marketing departments are often too immersed in their own messaging. It’s not vanity; it’s proximity. But proximity brings distortion. You start to mistake repetition for recognition, or attention for affection.

That’s why the most valuable mindset shift is to one of humble detachment.

Step back. Ask yourself: if you weren’t paid to care about this brand, would you? When you puncture that balloon, when you wear their shoes, you look at the world as it really is; messy, distracted, busy, full of competing priorities. And you start building brands that meet people in that reality, not the imagined one.

The higher you rise, the smaller the target
This isn’t just a job for insight teams or junior marketers. Senior stakeholders especially need consumer closeness. Because the higher up you go, the easier it is to drift away from real-world context.

It’s why some of the best brand leaders spend time on the shop floor, in people’s homes, or scrolling through Trustpilot comments. Not to chase trends, but to stay grounded. To avoid ivory tower thinking. To remember that marketing lives out in the world, not on slides.

And it’s not about lowering ambition, it’s about recalibrating it. Great brands aren’t the centre of their consumers’ lives they’re the reliable shortcuts that help us out in day-to-day. When you accept your place, you can show up with more relevance, more humility, and more impact. Your brand is not the hero in your customer’s story… they are. And that’s not a problem. That’s the brief.

Work out how to drop the ego, embrace humility, and focus on building brands that fit into real lives not just PowerPoint slides. Because in the end, being important to people starts by assuming that you’re not.

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, 2025

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

Brands and businesses with foundations of stone

Oho! Back to work after a long, hot Summer, and it’s the best time to be thinking about getting strong foundations in place for your brand or business. With a tough economy and challenging budgets, the way to grow is to ensure every precious penny you spend on your end consumer or customer is working as hard as it can for you.

The Crow Flies can help you do this – our ‘caw’ offers will give you rigourous research diagnosis, laser-focused strategy, impactful innovation & effective planning to ensures you can impact your market at scale. Get in touch we’d love to chat!

Pioneer or Fast Follow?

Even if you don’t drink alcohol, it’s unlikely you will have missed the rise of Jubel. Lagers flavoured (or ‘cut with’ as they put it) fruit. Peach led; other fruits have – and undoubtedly will continue – to be introduced as the brand grows.

When you spot a meaningful gap, a trend soon follows. From alcopops to cider over ice, from breakfast biscuits to zero deposit mortgages, name a category and it happens. And in beer, Jubel’s peachy flavoured lager set off a wave of fast followers.

There was Haacht’s (rather delicious) Super 8 Peach, a wheat beer infused with 25% peach juice. (Heineken’s) Beavertown Cosmic Drop then dropped in with two new fruit variants —Berry Punch and Watermelon Punch. The touch more traditional Greene King’s Peach Cooler, a peach-tinged session ale launched as part of its 2025 cask calendar. And just this week, Cornish Orchards launched a Peach & Apple cider, made from Cornish apples and … what? Penzance peaches (well, maybe, but is it really that mild in Penwith?).

It’s clear there are some instructive lessons.

Pioneers shoulder risk, followers harness scale
Being first means facing uncertainty and investing in consumer education. In a way, Jubel paid the education bill for the whole category. Others leap in once the trend is proving itself —often with broader distribution and marketing muscle.
If you’re going to innovate, for goodness’ sake own it
Innovation alone isn’t enough. Jubel has invested to be seen as the peach-drink; without doing this, a fast follower with better market reach or deeper pockets could overshadow it. Getting the brand story out, creating a clear proposition and identity, beyond just flavour, are vital for ownership.
But followers also amplify the category
When more brands join a trend, awareness grows (e.g., “peach-flavoured beer” becomes a recognised sub-category). That’s free category-building for the pioneer. But without differentiation or a distinctive identity, followers risk blending in rather than standing out.

Is it better to be a pioneer or a fast follower? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Pioneers get the cultural cachet (think Hooper’s Hooch), capture the early adopters and get the first run at the opportunity. But they have to remain ruthlessly focused, invest ahead of the curve and keep moving fast because fast followers can ride the wave with lower risk and scale. The issue for them is that with the desire to enter quickly they often don’t build their brand right. Imitation without distinctiveness means a short-term opportunity not a long term revenue stream.

If you’re going to go first, commit. If you’re going to fast follow, find genuine value-add, at pace.

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 or +44 (0) 7885 408367; www.thecrowflies.co.uk; @crowflieshigh.
© The Crow Flies, 2025