Volume 145: The Branded Feature.
The Branded Feature.
tl;dr: Another in my occasional brand architecture specials.
I’ve talked before about how poor the branding literature tends to be on brand architecture. A realization I came to many moons ago while consulting with G.E. while at the same time reading a book that showcased it as the premier example of a master branded/branded house architecture. Except that what I was reading and seeing in the real world were two radically different things. (For the record, what was happening within G.E. is what I call an accidentally atomized portfolio. The organization had responded to a CEO edict to be “no1 or 2 in any market or get out” by defining its markets ever more narrowly and thus atomizing the brand into thousands of disparate little G.E.s in the process).
Anyway, there are vastly more areas of confusion in brand architecture than simply between the four classic frameworks that are commonly labeled: master branded/branded house, sub-branded, endorsed, and portfolio/house of brands, and not just because most large organizations utilize multiple differing architectures, rather than just one.
Prime within that list of confusion is the branded feature.
What is a branded feature, and why does it matter, you might ask? Well, if you’ve ever heard of a Retina Display, that’s a branded feature. It’s when you take a product feature, and instead of simply describing it, which in this case would be a 300 pixels per-inch screen, you brand it (Retina Display).
What’s fascinating is that branded features are far more definitive of the Apple brand architecture than whether it’s a singular brand or sub-branded (in case you’re wondering, anyone who thinks Apple has a sub-branded architecture would be incorrect).
Why Apple pursues this strategy requires us to look back historically. Steve Jobs was famously enamored of Sony co-founder Akio Morita, who’ll go down in history as the inventor of the Walkman and a strangely unappreciated marketing genius.
The branded feature is one of the brand architecture techniques Morita pioneered at Sony, which Steve Jobs then copied. When I was kid, for example, I distinctly remember the Sony Trinitron being the best TV in the market, which remains the reason I exclusively buy Sony TVs many years later, and long after Trinitron ceased being a thing. (In case you’re wondering, back in the day, all CRT TVs were curved across all four sides, except the Sony Trinitron T.V.s, which were only curved top and bottom, leaving the sides perfectly flat, giving you a less visibly distorted picture as a result).
Why do you waste time and energy branding features, you might ask?
Well, put very simply for two reasons:
Because you’re operating in a category where product obsolescence is quick, and opportunities for differentiation are limited, for example, T.V.s. Here, you might brand a particular technology or feature that will run across a model range and longitudinally across the replacement cycle. To continue with the Trinitron example, it represented a screen technology you could only get from Sony; it ran across multiple T.V. models and remained consistent over time as newer ones replaced older models. In other words, the branded feature had greater longevity and distinctiveness and delivered more value in driving consumer desire than any individual product, which were largely unbranded outside of a model number because there were too many being replaced too quickly to bother putting scarce brand-building resources into any one directly.
Because you can, this is not me being frivolous. One of the critical aspects of the branded feature is that it requires a lot of marketing discipline and resources to pull off, so it tends to be a strategy only available to the largest brands in a segment as, in general, only the largest can afford to establish and then build and manage multiple feature brands across their portfolio and have consumers get some sense of what they mean. (This doesn’t mean others don’t try, it’s just that if you lack the resources and discipline, it’s unlikely any branded features you try to launch will become meaningful as differentiators).
Let’s look at Apple through this lens for a second. Off the top of my head, I can think of the following branded features they offer - Retina Display, Bionic chips, M chips, MagSafe, Thunderbolt, ProMotion, TrueDepth, Photonic Engine, Digital Crown, Dynamic Island, FaceID, TouchID…
Some of these are proprietary technologies (MagSafe), and some are widely available features labeled to look like a proprietary Apple technology. ProMotion, for example, means a 120hz refresh rate screen, widely available on PCs and Android phones.
Net, net, however, what Apple does is run branded features across its product categories (e.g., Retina Display on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and FaceID on your iPhone and your iPad) and over time. Hence, as models change, they will still have a Retina Screen or FaceID. And, because these things have been branded, they now look like things the competition doesn’t offer. Not necessarily because they don’t (Facial recognition, for example, is pretty standard these days), but because they can’t offer the specifically Apple-branded variant.
The goal is to create simple shorthands for feature superiority, create consumer desire for branded features with a longer arc across which to become distinctive than any specific product and create competitive separation and differentiation - especially if you seek a category price premium, which branded features enable because it gives you something the competition does not have.
A further benefit is that you can turn branded features on and off within a product line, which then helps your customer navigate through different price points. Thus, the iPhone 14 Pro has more branded features than the iPhone SE, which helps justify a significant difference in price between two products that essentially do the exact same thing.
So, when and where do you use a branded feature strategy, and when and where don’t you?
Well, just in case Sony and Apple weren’t a big enough clue, the defining characteristics for when branded features might be appropriate are generally when:
You’re in a category within which there is a fast turnover of SKUs due to an ongoing cycle of obsolescence/upgrade. E.G., consumer electronics, computing, SaaS.
It’s hard to differentiate individual products because they won’t exist long enough to make the investment worthwhile.
You wish to establish the basis for charging an ongoing price premium because you have something the competition lacks.
You need many individual SKUs to compete in all market segments, so you need a shorthand for the customer to navigate the price/value equation at each price point.
You have the consumer attention, resources, and marketing discipline to build meaning into branded features across multiple product SKUs and over time across multiple product cycles.
When a branded feature strategy doesn’t work is probably easier to describe using an example. Take the W Hotel, which tried to re-brand the concierge desk as “whatever, whenever” without realizing that:
A. What you call the concierge desk makes little or no difference in differentiating a hotel brand; it simply isn’t something anyone chooses a hotel based on.
B. If you don’t have the discipline and resources to build meaning into the branding, all you create is confusion rather than value.
This is why, when I used to stay at the W Hotel, I’d stare at the in-room phone in frustration before randomly hitting buttons because I couldn’t figure out which of its seemingly random labels would do something as basic as put me through to reception.
So, yeah. The branded feature. Kind of an old-school brand architecture strategy first popularized by Sony, then widely copied by the consumer electronics category, before being perfected by Apple.
If you fit the criteria of fast product cycles and rapid technological churn, where it’s hard, if not impossible, to build long-term equity into any single product variant, then it might be the strategy for you too.
If you have the discipline and cross-silo management competence and can afford to do it, that is.