Achieving the Ideal Brand Portfolio

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To optimize a portfolio of brands, companies can use a step-by-step approach: decide on the brands to review; analyze each brand with respect to its contribution to the company; assess the brands according to current market performance (traction) and future prospects (momentum); and classify the brands along those three dimensions (contribution, traction, and momentum), allowing managers to identify both challenges and opportunities. The process enables companies to sort their brands into different categories: power (a brand that needs to be defended ferociously and deployed judiciously), sleeper (a brand that with a little fast tracking can build into a power brand), slider (a valuable brand that has lost momentum, is slipping backwards, and needs immediate intervention to prevent meltdown), soldier (a solid brand that contributes quietly without the need for much management attention), black hole (a brand that sucks up resources and may or may not ever pay out), rocket (a brand that is on its way to power-brand status), wallflower (a small, underappreciated brand with very loyal customers, often underpriced and undermarketed), and discard (a brand that should have been mothballed years ago). Companies can then tie together the objectives for each brand into an overall plan, which will include brand architecture and resource allocation.

• Brand management
• Marketing strategy