Alright, you have identified that you want to shrink the number of brands in your portfolio in order to gain cost efficiencies and create more clarity for the customer. Furthermore, senior management are on board and have given you the green light for the plan. How in the world do you sell this to the teams that gave birth to these brands without dashing their hopes and switching their emphasis to your parent brand.

Naturally, some of the brand owners expressed concerns over loosing what they have created in the market and felt somewhat threatened by the recommendations and international best practice that were reviewed. We think it would be very productive if we could also build confidence around the changes and demonstrate that the brand-owners have responsibilities for the changes that will take place in the portfolio of brands.

In our experience, brand owners naturally take great pride, not only in the brand they have created, but in all the positive actions that have gone into creating that brand. The trick is to capitalise on these constructive actions in order to continue growing your parent brand. An important message to convey – again and again – will be that you are not abandoning all you have learned in the creation of these sub-brands as the company transitions to a streamlined portfolio.

You will want to reinforce this message in the actions you take next, so you can reassure the sub-brand owners that all their good ideas will be used as you continue build the parent brand with greater focus. As a first exercise, you can meet with these brand-owners and ask them to take inventory of all the activities and communication techniques that are working well with their sub-brands. This activity can be done with you facilitating the groups in smaller sessions to get them talking about the detail that led to their sub-brand’s success. The sub-brand owners’ activities and the effort in focus can be current and in the past. You essentially want to understand what the team has been doing well so you can transfer as much of this learning and skill into their new roles and not lose any of the intellectual capital associated with the development of these sub-brands.

This exercise has three effects. First, it helps the team build their confidence that their hard work is appreciated and will continue to be appreciated. Second, it will capture important information about the ‘sub-brand experiments’ that have been ongoing before we eliminate them and potentially loose the knowledge that has made them a success. Third, through talking about the detail of each effort, the brand owners will be able to discern what elements of their effort were due to creative strategies, approaches to market, and customer focus versus the virtues of the sub-brand itself. As a brand agency, we often find that this exercise results in the realisation that the parent brand does not hold the sub-brand back. Indeed, brand owners often conclude that if they applied the same efforts and actions to the parent brand as they did to the sub-brand, that their service would have been even more of a success.

There are no magic questions to ask during these sessions. The key to successful sessions is in getting down to the detail and having an open i.e. not an agenda-driven, conversation about the reasons behind the successes they have enjoyed with the sub-brand and what they would like to take into the future. Since these are smart, driven people, you will not need to ‘lead them down the garden path’. With an examination into the detail behind their success, they will draw their own conclusions – either during the session or shortly afterward.

I’ll emphasise the need to promote the fact that the brand owners’ activities up to this point have been worthwhile and have produced positive results. In order to understand how to repeat and improve upon these results for the parent brand, we will need to ask them about the detail of what works well in the promotion and delivery of the brands that have created. What tricks did they learn when selling this brand? What messages have been particularly effective? How much detail do they go into when talking about the technical nature of the product or service? What aspects of their promotions stuck in customers’ minds? What kind of customers respond best to the brand they have created? Why do they believe this? What elements of the sub-brand have them so excited? How have they lead the market against the competition?

How will you use this information? You’ll need to plot out the major milestones for purging the brands from your portfolio (e.g. stage one is immediately, stage two is at the parent brand re-launch, stage three is one year from the parent brand re-launch) so that you can plan the migration of the brand portfolio.

You can use the inventory developed by the brand-owners to help put into context how much work will be required for bringing the sub-brands back into the parent brand. If it is a matter of bringing in a new copy-style for communications, then it will not take much to bring the sub-brand into the fold of the parent brand.

At this point in the programme, you need to appreciate the fact that you have just told them that we are ‘taking their babies away’. In order to soften this blow, you want to re-build their confidence and remind them of all the achievements they have had in promoting these brands and ensure that we capture this valuable learning before we change the portfolio.

It sounds elementary but you want to focus mainly on the positive aspects of their experience with the creation and maintenance of their sub-brands. If you focus on the negative, or adopt a problem-solving approach, you run the risk of dampening their already bruised spirits. Furthermore, you will not learn about what has made these sub-brand team’s efforts a success. Often in change situations, a problem-solving approach will end up associating change with the confrontation of hurdles or problems that need to be reckoned with, but do not necessarily drive the success of the brand.

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