I'm the Strategy Director at the Creative Business Company. Subscribe for marketing guides, insights and deep dives.
Making a $1.8b company greater than the sum of its parts
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Hey - I’ll be the first to admit that brand architecture isn’t a sexy topic. But bad brand architecture is a silent killer for many SME and Enterprise companies, because messy brand portfolios make it a nightmare for marketing teams to effectively promote their brands in a clear, consistent and compelling way. Morningstar, a $1.8b financial services company that provides global investment data, research and technologies, had a large portfolio that they were struggling to manage. A decade of acquisition-led growth resulted in:
New family brandsWorking with the central brand team, we reshaped the public face of Morningstar with a global brand architecture initiative that introduced six new family brands. Our new family brands - Morningstar Data+Analytics, Wealth, ESG, Credit, Retirement and Indexes - replace hundreds of overlapping product brands and serve as intuitive portals that help clients discover and engage with the product portfolio. Simplified PortfolioCross-selling and up-selling multi-product solutions was difficult because no-one agreed internally on what constituted a product, platform, or feature. We developed a single hierarchy and classification system for the portfolio that both employees and clients could easily understand. Global naming systemWhile on paper Morningstar followed a descriptive naming approach, in practice the various business units applied their own naming conventions and logic to their various products and services. We created a simpler naming process, along with new tools and guidance on developing a rich palette of potential names for future products. Competitive positioningLike many B2B companies, Morningstar would go-to-market with messaging and campaigns that over-emphasized product features and benefits over their clients’ problems and needs. Working with marketing teams inside the business, we positioned the new family brands around the needs of advisors, asset managers, institutional investors and issuers of securities, and the unique ways Morningstar could address them. Results
It might not be as exciting as a splashy brand campaign, but fixing a messy portfolio can deliver long-term results on the bottom line.
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Ian Barnard
I'm the Strategy Director at the Creative Business Company. Subscribe for marketing guides, insights and deep dives.
Are you selling complicated or complex services to people who don’t fully understand the value of what they’re getting? It’s a common problem for a lot of software and technology companies, especially when the people who use their products (developers) aren’t the ones who actually buy them (business executives). This is a quick story of how we helped a highly technical organization clearly articulate their business value in a more simple and human way. Estimated read time: 2 minutes and 30...
We nearly destroyed 3 years’ worth of distinctive assets when re-doing our website and brand identity. This is one of the early directions we really liked. An early concept for our re-brand It looked sleek. Professional. Tasteful. Premium. But someone pointed out that it looked nothing like our current branding. And despite wanting to change our visual identity, this was a problem. Because after regularly pumping out social media content, guides, and reports, people began to associate us with...
Hi, it's Ian. There’s always a guiding thought going through my head whenever I write marketing content: “No-one cares about you. They only care about what you can do for them.” As general life advice it’s a bit depressing, but it’s also the perfect mindset for creating really good newsletters, social posts, and ads. Don’t talk about yourself - focus on what other people want and how you can help them. You might feel I’m breaking this rule by asking you to check out our new website. My...