We’re believers in the power of a clear, relatable brand at Via TRM. Our company is on a mission to engage every student in global opportunities, and we know that technology alone will not help us achieve this mission. The ideas and people who build and use the technology are just as important as the product itself – and that’s what brand is, a sum of all parts.
Leading up to a new product launch in October 2020, however, we faced a challenge with our current brand. Our company name, Via TRM, had always done triple-time and been our brand, the name of our study abroad software, and description of a new category we created in “Traveler Relationship Management.”
We needed to name our new product and distinguish our company from our core study abroad product.
It was time for us to look at our Brand Architecture.
Brand Architecture is a system that organizes brands, products and services to help an audience access and relate to a brand. A successful Brand Architecture enables consumers to form opinions and preferences for an entire family of brands by interacting with or learning about only one brand in that family. Source.
Brand Architecture can bring value to an organization, particularly in a time of ambiguity, in a number of ways:
To begin our research process, we took a journey down memory lane and chronicled the history of Via TRM and the evolution of the brand:
And we sketched out our current brand architecture.
And, perhaps most importantly, we identified some of the questions we needed to address:
Our executive team discussed what it would look like to build our brand architecture so that we were ready to scale.
After we had an idea of the why, we needed to identify our goals for reconsidering the Brand Architecture.
We knew that we wanted to continue to own the category that we had created of “Traveler Relationship Management” (TRM).
We identified that we needed our Brand Architecture to accomplish two things:
One clear opportunity for improvement, and the anchor to enacting this new Brand Architecture, was our website.
Our previous website functioned and it accomplished a few key things:
As we considered the modern journey of customers, especially in 2020, we knew that there were key things that the old website wasn’t accomplishing:
A key question to ask when considering Brand Architecture is if the company should be a house of brands, or a branded house.
The Branded House strategy has one main identity that unifies all products, like Google in the example above.
A House of Brands, on the other hand, has an almost invisible master brand, and each product has its own identity and marketing.
The Hybrid strategy is a combination of both strategies and allows for master brand visibility in addition to product-specific marketing and identity.
As we explored these options, we knew that Via TRM should be a house of brands. We created and own the TRM category, and all of our products are ultimately about making travel and travel management more simple.
Once we identified our structure, we got to work and laid out our new brand architecture. For us, this process included naming both our study abroad software and the new solo & group travel software products in addition to rebuilding our website.
For the naming process, we hosted an all-team brainstorming session using Google’s Jamboard to visual represent the conversation and Asana to track our ideas.
And this is where we landed…
We decided that Via TRM would be elevated to stand as our master brand and we introduced:
We brought our new Brand Architecture home by building a new website which communicates the value of each of our products, while also communicating the value of Traveler Relationship Management across industries.
Like most strategic undertakings, revising our Brand Architecture was supported by a number of people. Special thanks to: