Building Brand Architecture With Web Scraping

As more and more products enter the market, having a strong brand presence is required to stand out and attract consumers. Lots of larger household brands, such as Procter & Gamble, have lots of tinier brands contained within them. For larger brands like this, brand architecture is an essential approach. Brand architecture is the process of organizing the subsections of a larger brand. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a web page, is a data collection strategy useful for people at all experience levels of working with data. Gathering relevant online data with the help of a web scraping tool allows you to create strategies based on those insights. Learning how to make a brand architecture analysis helps increase brand clarity, increase revenue, and create an inclusive workplace.

If you understand some of brand architecture as a coordinated approach to strategic marketing, then use the table of contents below to learn more about its benefits for both consumers and your organization.

Table of Contents

What is Brand Architecture?

Brand architecture is the organization of sub-brands within a larger brand. This involves brands where each subsection shares the larger brand name, large companies that own many different brands, and brands that lie somewhere in between. Recognizing the right brand architecture strategy for your organization is crucial to reaping the benefits.

Before deciding on a strategy, you must first collect relevant data to analyze your brand. Using a web scraper allows you to easily collect online data and find the best approach. With the right approach, marketers and consumers alike will be able to understand how your brands work together as a unit and on their own depending on the situation. This helps increase consumer recognition of different brands, making it easier for people to decide which products are right for them.

How to Build Brand Architecture

When choosing the right plan for building your branding architecture, you must first understand the current state of your brand and its recognition among consumers and marketers. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from web pages, is the optimal tool for collecting relevant data. Because online data is so ubiquitous, this strategy is immensely useful for even smaller brands just getting started.

Ways to assess brand health with web scraping include

• Scrape sentiment data from existing customers from online reviews
• Collect internal data from employees, executives, and shareholders and compare and contrast their values
• Scrape competitor product, price, and review data from online retail sites like Wayfair
• Use data collected from web scraping to perform analysis and develop strategies

Types and Steps to Analyze Brand Architecture

Once you’ve used web scraping to collect useful online data, you should then tailor your approach based on the type of brand you are working with. Below are the three main brand strategies.

The branded house

A branded house consists of a larger brand whose sub-brands share the name with the parent brand. For example, FedEx is a large brand that has different groups such as FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, and FedEx Services. All three smaller brands specialize in different services, yet can all be identified by the larger FedEx branding. The branded house also applies to brands like the local chapters of a non-profit that works within a specific community, or even international arts festivals.

The goal when creating an architecture for a branded house model is to strengthen the main brand, which therefore strengthens the smaller brands. However, it is also important to magnify distinctions between the sub-brands since the shared name can be confusing for consumers. Gaining clarity through brand architecture helps consumers and marketers you might work with understand the differences.

The house of brands

Opposite to the branded house is the house of brands. The most notable example is Procter & Gamble which owns smaller brands such as Crest, Charmin, and Cascade. Renaming each acquired brand to fit the larger Procter & Gamble name would be confusing for consumers with pre-existing knowledge of the smaller brands. In this scenario, it is better to try and pair brands for products that consumers would normally buy together (dish soap and laundry detergent) so that consumers are buying from multiple brands within your larger house of brands.

Using web scraping tools to learn more about your consumers will help you think of ways to bundle together different brands. For example, you can scrape social media profiles to discover which other brands consumers already follow. If you’re lucky, two of those brands will be in your house and then your goal is to pair those products with the larger brand in the mind of the public.

The endorsed brand

The endorsed brand falls somewhere in between the previous two. While the sub-brands might share the larger brand name, each one has a distinct purpose. Tech companies are common examples. Google owns Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and more applications that are bundled together under the larger Google account. While each application is tech-based and online, each one serves a different purpose for a consumer.

By highlighting how the products connect or work together, consumers will become more loyal and stay with you as your brand evolves.

Web Scraping for Brand Architecture Strategy

Web scraping is a useful tool for collecting the data necessary to understand your brand and the best strategy moving forward. Below are some of the benefits of having a solid strategy and how web scraping helps you along the way.

Gain brand clarity

One of the most important reasons for building a smart brand architecture is to gain clarity with consumers and marketers. For marketers, they need to clearly understand how your various brands come together to build an effective marketing strategy. For consumers, they will have a hard time differentiating between sub-brands if the distinctions aren’t clear enough. This can cost you money if it makes consumers less likely to buy complementary products if they aren’t aware of how complementary they are.

Using Scraping Robot’s scraping tools, you can scrape online sentiment data from consumers using social media sites and online reviews. Scraping of reviews provides valuable insights for how to make design or product purpose more clear for potential consumers. Social media comments become useful sentiment data for understanding how your brand is engaged online. Tapping into an existing narrative or creating a better one are ways to help amplify your brand.

Expand revenue through cross-selling

For brands that fall under the ‘house of brands’ style, cross-selling is a useful strategy for guiding future purchases. A brand that owns both a laundry detergent brand and a dish soap brand can easily pair these products in a way that is useful for consumers.

Scraping product reviews gives you insight into how consumers use specific products. Once you understand this, it is easier to create appealing bundles for consumers that tackle many issues at once. Using online retail sites to find price data for competing products helps you create a pricing strategy for bundles that is of better value than the individual products. After all, creating a bundle at a great price is hard to resist since it gives a consumer all the things they want in one order at a better price.

Foster better communication between brands

While most of these tips focus on increasing brand awareness among consumers, ensuring that all your employees, executives, and shareholders are on the same page is just as important. Especially for organizations with many different brands, creating a unifying message fosters a more productive workplace as those working in different sub-brands will have a better sense of how their work is related to one another.

Web Scraping with Scraping Robot API

Scraping Robot’s API is especially useful in this situation. Since larger brands are likely to have separate data departments for sub-brands, it can be a struggle to manually incorporate online data found with web scraping into pre-existing analysis tools. With our API, you can directly import data collected with our web scraping tools into the program of your choice. This makes it easier to combine internally and externally generated data for stronger overall analysis. When trying to understand the beliefs of all your different brands, combining the data with the help of our API makes the process smoother and successful.

A scraping API allows you to collect data at a high volume and fast right from any number of data sources available to you. If you think of data like a resource, you have to have the right tools to extract it. Our scraper API will scrape your target source while at the same time uploading and corraling all that information directly into a program, eliminating any middle man processes and hooking data up directly to your functions. If this seems like the right tool for your brand or organization, look at our process page for more information.

Conclusion

The market economy is a network of conglomerates– larger brands that own smaller, subsidiary brands. Connecting your brands in the mind of the consumer allows them to understand your different products better, leading to more informed purchases and bundling. Brand architecture is an essential process of recognizing how your brands relate and making it clear for the consumer through smart ad campaigns or bundles of goods. When you engage in this process, your brands will be better known and understood among consumers, you’ll have a more unified workplace, and increase revenue by cross-selling different brands.

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Hannah Benson