Brand Architecture: Branded House vs House of Brands, and What Each Costs

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Brand architecture is the way an organization arranges its brands. It covers which name leads and how much the others borrow from it. The usual map has four models (a branded house, sub-brands, endorsed brands and a house of brands). Few organizations use only one. Start by asking what your parent name has to do for a client, a donor, a regulator or an acquirer. The answer often narrows the choice to one or two models for each part of the business.

We work through this question with clients that run more than one brand.

This guide touches on trademark, cannabis and legal-profession rules. It isn’t legal advice, and your own counsel has the final word on what applies to you.

The four brand architecture models

David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler laid out the four in a 2000 article in California Management Review called “The Brand Relationship Spectrum.” Their abstract defines brand architecture as “an organizing structure of the brand portfolio that specifies brand roles and the nature of relationships between brands.” In the article, the branded house and the house of brands are the two extremes, with sub-brands and endorsed brands in between.

Branded house

One name does nearly all the work. Every unit carries it, sometimes with a plain descriptor, so one unit’s reputation, good or bad, can spread to the rest. FedEx is a common example. In January 2000 its holding company, then called FDX Corporation, announced it would rename itself FedEx Corporation and rename units such as RPS, which became FedEx Ground. Frederick W. Smith, the chairman, said it was “time to leverage and extend one of our greatest assets, the FedEx brand.”

Sub-brands

The master brand stays in front, with a second name that adds a specific meaning. Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores work this way. Habitat describes them as “independently owned reuse stores operated by local Habitat for Humanity organizations,” and they trade under the Habitat name. Most of the trust still comes from the parent. Sub-brands make sense when a line of work needs its own personality and would gain little from standing alone.

Endorsed brands

The product or unit has its own name, and the parent appears as a guarantee. Marriott’s annual report lists hotel brands such as Courtyard by Marriott and Residence Inn by Marriott. Facebook did the same with its products. When it introduced a new company brand in November 2019, it said it had been “adding a company endorsement to products like Oculus, Workplace and Portal,” and that in June it had started including “from Facebook” within all its apps. Two years later it renamed the company Meta, which it said “brings together our apps and technologies under one new company brand.” Mark Zuckerberg’s letter that day added, “Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either.”

House of brands

The parent stays in the background while each brand stands on its own. Larry Page’s 2015 letter announcing Alphabet, which Google filed with the SEC, explains the reasoning. “Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies,” he wrote, and the structure “allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.” He added that Alphabet was not meant to be “a big consumer brand with related products,” because “Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.”

Mixing the models

Aaker and Joachimsthaler wrote that “nearly all organizations will use a mixture of all of them,” and that a pure branded house or house of brands is rare. Even FedEx’s 2000 announcement left two units, Viking Freight and Caribbean Transportation Services, “retaining their individual identities.” We’ll call a portfolio like that a hybrid. A mix can also build up through acquisitions, when each new unit keeps the name it came with.

What the research says about which model performs better

Not much that settles it for a mid-sized organization. All three studies below use publicly traded companies, and two describe their samples as large firms.

Rao, Agarwal and Dahlhoff (2004) sorted 113 large US companies by the strategy their brand names showed: corporate branding, house of brands or mixed (separately named brands alongside the corporate name). Using five years of data, they found that “corporate branding strategy is associated with higher values of Tobin’s q, and mixed branding strategy is associated with lower values of Tobin’s q,” after controlling for other factors. Tobin’s q, a company’s market value over the replacement cost of its assets, is their gauge of intangible value. In their working paper on the same firms, drawn from the S&P 500, they noted that a company’s visible strategy “is not necessarily a result of deliberate brand decision-making” and wrote that general recommendations “cannot be derived from this research.”

Their mixed group lumped several models together. A 2016 follow-up by Hsu, Fournier and Srinivasan split it into sub-brands, endorsed brands and true hybrids, and reported that the trade-offs between risk and return for those three “differ significantly from what common wisdom suggests.”

Morgan and Rego (2009) looked at 72 large public consumer companies from 1994 to 2003. They found the number of brands a firm owns “is positively associated with the firm’s Tobin’s q and consumer loyalty performance.” The same measure is “negatively associated with market share and is associated with higher relative advertising and SG&A spending,” meaning more spent on advertising and on selling, general and administrative costs as a share of sales. The authors still judged that “larger brand portfolios would seem broadly desirable,” and cautioned that their findings may not hold for smaller, privately held or business-to-business firms.

What each brand costs to run

Trademarks are the easiest cost to count. Neither the US nor Canada requires you to register a trademark, but registration shapes how far your rights reach, and each registration is national. A standalone brand worth protecting needs its own filings, charged per class of goods or services. You can file in each country, or extend a home filing to several countries in one application through WIPO’s Madrid System, which both countries belong to.

Government feeUnited States (USPTO)Canada (CIPO, 2026)
New application, first class$350 per classCAD $491.06 (online)
Each additional class$350CAD $149.04
Keeping it registered$325 per class for a Section 8 declaration; $650 per class for the combined Section 8 and 9 renewalCAD $595.06 for the first class at renewal (online), $185.49 for each additional class

One brand filed directly in two classes in both countries comes to $700 in US filing fees and CAD $640.10 in Canada (online), before legal fees or USPTO surcharges, which start at $100 per class. A four-brand portfolio pays that four times over, and each brand then carries its own maintenance and renewal fees.

In our experience, trademark fees are the smaller part. Most of the cost is ongoing work, repeated for each standalone brand:

  • A website and domain per brand, each with its own hosting, accessibility work, security patching and content to keep current.
  • Search visibility built separately. Each domain earns its own links and reputation. Two brands that serve the same buyer can end up competing with each other in results.
  • A design system per brand, or a shared one with enough room for several identities. Our guide to distinctive brand assets covers what makes each identity recognizable.
  • Claims review per brand in regulated sectors. Each extra brand adds material to re-check whenever a rule changes.

When the rules choose the model for you

In two regulated sectors we’ve worked in, the law makes part of the decision.

Licensed cannabis in Canada

The Cannabis Act’s definition of “brand element” covers brand names, trademarks, tradenames, logos and slogans that are reasonably associated with, or evoke, cannabis or a cannabis brand. Section 17 prohibits promoting cannabis unless the Act authorizes it, including any promotion that associates a brand element with “a way of life such as one that includes glamour, recreation, excitement, vitality, risk or daring.” The Act allows only narrow exceptions, such as informational or brand-preference promotion online where the company has “taken reasonable steps to ensure that the promotion cannot be accessed by a young person.” Section 26 bans the same lifestyle associations on packages and labels.

The Cannabis Regulations add identity rules. Every label must give the name, phone number and email address of the licence holder that made the product, and that licensed name must also appear in the holder’s advertising. The licensed name works as a legal disclosure, and it may belong to a subsidiary or a contract manufacturer. If it carries your corporate name, though, the parent can’t stay fully hidden. A label also “may include only one brand element, other than a brand name,” which leaves each brand little room on the package for a personality of its own.

Law firms after a merger or rename

Under the comments to ABA Model Rule 7.1, a firm may use the names of current members, of deceased members “where there has been a succession in the firm’s identity,” or “a trade name if it is not false or misleading.” The comments also cover “a distinctive website address, social media username or comparable professional designation that is not misleading,” which matters when merged firms choose a domain. A firm with offices in more than one jurisdiction “may use the same name or other professional designation in each jurisdiction.” And lawyers “may not imply or hold themselves out as practicing together in one firm when they are not a firm.”

That last rule bears on affiliated networks and on mergers that are still partly separate. A shared brand that makes two firms look like one can raise a professional-conduct problem. In Ontario, the Law Society’s rules count “firm names (including trade names), letterhead, business cards and logos” as marketing, which must be “demonstrably true, accurate and verifiable.” Other states and provinces have their own versions, so check yours. Our guide to attorney advertising rules compares Ontario, New York and the ABA, and our page on law firm websites covers how we build to them.

Merging brands is a website migration

Google’s own documentation lists “merging multiple domains or hostnames” as a kind of site move. It says to “expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move.” On redirects it says: “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” Google’s Change of Address help page gives a shorter floor of 180 days, and recommends paying for each old domain for at least a year so nobody else can buy and misuse it. We plan around the longer figures.

The same help page warns against merging several sites at once: “Try not to combine multiple moves to a single location. Moving sites A, B, and C all to new location D can cause some confusion and traffic loss.” It suggests moving them one at a time and waiting for traffic to settle before the next. Google’s site-move guide also says to change one thing at a time, so move the domain before you redesign. We wrote separately about redesigning a site without losing search traffic, which covers the redirect map in detail.

The business side can be staged as well. When Marriott replaced Marriott Rewards, The Ritz-Carlton Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest with Marriott Bonvoy, it unified the program’s benefits on August 18, 2018, and moved to the single name on February 13, 2019. The company said the SPG and Ritz-Carlton Rewards apps “will be deactivated on that date.”

If a unit might be sold or spun off later

A shared master name can be hard to divide. When Kellogg Company spun off WK Kellogg Co in October 2023, the parent took the name Kellanova. Under the trademark agreement signed at the split, Kellanova kept ownership of the Kellogg’s name and gave WK Kellogg Co an exclusive, royalty-free license, which the agreement calls perpetual, to use it in North America in the food categories assigned to it. Both companies have since been sold. Ferrero bought WK Kellogg Co in September 2025 and Mars bought Kellanova that December, so Kellogg’s cereals now come from businesses with two different owners.

FedEx is going through a version of this now. FedEx Freight became an independent public company on June 1, 2026, and licenses the FedEx Freight name from Federal Express. Its filing says the license runs “for an initial term of five years” and renews a year at a time “for up to an additional five years” unless either side opts out. Federal Express can end it early only for an uncured material breach, bankruptcy or “a change of control of FedEx Freight or Freight Holding.” The agreement can’t run past ten years in total, and when it ends, FedEx Freight must stop using the licensed marks, including by taking “FedEx” out of its corporate name.

If you run a roll-up, a holding company or a nonprofit with units that could become independent, decide this before putting every unit under one master name. An endorsed model can make a later sale or spin-off simpler, because the unit already trades under its own name and only the endorsement has to come off.

A checklist before you decide

As a rough guide, if the parent name is what earns trust with clients or donors, keep it in front, as a branded house or with sub-brands. If units serve different buyers, answer to different rules or might be sold, give them their own names, endorsed or fully separate. Where the answer differs by unit, you have a hybrid, so write down which model each unit gets and why.

  • Write down what the parent name has to do: satisfy regulators, show clients you’re big enough, give donors confidence or stay out of the way.
  • List every brand, sub-brand, program name and domain you own today, including old names that still appear somewhere.
  • Mark which of them share a buyer. Those are the likely search overlaps.
  • Price each standalone brand per year: trademarks in each country, site upkeep, content and compliance review.
  • Check your sector’s rules on names, labels and claims before you choose.
  • Ask whether any unit could be sold or spun off in the next five years.
  • If you’re merging sites, move them one at a time and keep the redirects at least a year.

Brand architecture sits between our strategy and branding work, and it usually shapes the website too. If you’re adding a brand or merging two and want a second opinion on the structure, book a call.

Sources

, CEO and Design Lead, Innovara Studios. Yona leads design at Innovara Studios, from brand identity and product design to the websites the studio builds for clients. How we research and write.