Alexander Koene & Kim Cramer PhD
strategy
23-04-2025
Article: Brand portfolio strategy 2025: One Brand, Unless…
Brand portfolio strategy in 2025 needs fewer labels, sharper recognition and one clear story. Explore BR-ND People’s One Brand, Unless… logic.
Brand portfolio strategy 2025: One Brand, Unless…
Fewer brands, more meaning
Ten years ago, we wrote that the age of endless brand lists was coming to an end. We saw a shift towards simplicity: fewer names, fewer loose labels, less internal logic that makes perfect sense in a boardroom and no sense at all to the person trying to buy something.
In 2025, that argument has not dated. It has sharpened.
The world is faster, fuller and noisier. Our brains, however, remain those energy-saving machines we inherited from prehistoric times. Excellent at spotting patterns. Deeply unimpressed by puzzles they did not ask for. And certainly not designed for fifteen versions of the same organisation, each with its own name, colour, tone and promise.
Most brand portfolios are not designed. They accumulate. Through mergers. Acquisitions. Internal politics. Historical loyalties. Someone wants a flag of their own. Someone else cannot bear to retire the old name. Before long, you have a group of brands that vaguely recognise each other from the Christmas drinks.
The result is an office full of capable strangers who happen to share the same Slack workspace. Inside, everyone is busy explaining how the structure works. Outside, the customer has quietly taken a wrong turn.
The science of the lazy brain
Let’s begin where we prefer to begin: with people.
The human brain dislikes unnecessary work. Especially when brands are involved. Every new name, every different logo, every separate website and every sub-promise asks something of the user: attention, memory, interpretation. That may sound minor, but in a world drowning in signals, attention is not loose change. It is the hard currency.
Recognition works because it saves energy. A strong brand lets people feel, quickly: I know this. I understand this. I trust this. The brain takes the path of least resistance not because people are lazy, but because the system is clever enough not to write a PhD thesis on every decision.
That is why fragmentation is so expensive. Not just in media spend or design hours, but in trust. If people cannot immediately grasp who you are, what you promise and why it matters, they look for someone who makes the choice feel simpler.
The spreadsheets may have worked. The people did not.
Positive rebellion against brand sprawl
At BR-ND People, we work from a clear principle: One Brand, Unless…
One brand, unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise. Not because one brand is always neater, prettier or easier to manage. Because simplicity often takes more courage than complexity. Cutting is harder than adding. Bringing things together is more political than splitting them apart. And making a choice tends to hurt more than inventing another label.
That is exactly where the value lies.
Why spend millions building five separate reputations when you could build one brand people actually remember? Why ask employees to explain a brand architecture they only understand after three onboarding sessions, two diagrams and a quiet lie-down?
A strong brand portfolio is not an administrative overview. It is a decision about where your energy goes. Towards fragmentation, or recognition. Towards internal nuance, or external clarity. Towards protecting old names, or building future trust.
The rebellion, then, is not in launching yet another shiny thing. The rebellion is in saying: this belongs together. This can be stronger. This should be simpler.
The lesson from a.s.r. and Ditzo
Take a.s.r. and Ditzo. For years, there was a perfectly reasonable case for keeping distance between the two. Ditzo had the freshness of a challenger. a.s.r. had the solidity of an established name. The thinking made sense: if the parent brand feels too heavy, give a newer audience a lighter door in.
That is exactly what the “Unless” is for. Sometimes a brand touches a different emotional nerve. Sometimes an audience needs a different point of entry. Sometimes distance is not weakness; it is wisdom.
But brands do not stand still. What was strategically sound ten years ago can become dead weight today.
In 2025, almost every customer is digitally fluent. Comparison is normal. Scepticism arrives quickly. People see through artificial separations with far less effort than many organisations would like. And when two brands share the same promise, the same organisation and increasingly the same emotional drivers, distance stops creating value. It becomes theatre.
The integration of Ditzo into a.s.r. was not a defeat for the challenger. It was a coming of age. The rebellious energy did not need to disappear; it needed to become part of the larger brand. No longer a side road, but a sharper edge in the main story.
That is the point of good brand architecture: you do not throw away what has value. You carry forward what makes the brand stronger, and let the rest retire with dignity.
Why the “Unless” still matters
We do not believe in one brand as dogma. We take people too seriously for that.
Sometimes a second brand is the right answer. Not because a manager is attached to it. Not because an acquired label is “still quite well known”. Not because the old visual identity is sitting on 800 building signs, however distressing that may be for facilities.
An exception is only strong when it makes human sense.
With 23plusone, we look at the deeper drivers beneath brand choice. What are people really seeking? Security? Recognition? Freedom? Control? Connection? If a new initiative speaks to a genuinely different need, requires a different kind of trust or serves an audience with opposing values, then a second brand may be wise.
But the reason must be precise. Not: “the market is different.” Which market? Which person? Which tension? Which choice makes a separate brand more credible than one strong story?
The “Unless” is not a back door for indecision. It is a quality filter.
Your employees carry the portfolio from the inside
There is another reason brand portfolios get stuck: they are viewed too much from the outside. Name. Logo. Website. Campaign. As if brands mainly live on screens.
They do not.
Your employees carry the brand every day. In conversations. In choices. In behaviour. In the way people work together when nobody is watching.
If they cannot explain in one sentence what the group stands for, you do not have a brand architecture. You have an internal puzzle with payslips. And no, a ping-pong table in reception will not fix it.
A clear portfolio gives people language. It helps teams understand what they are part of. It stops departments from behaving like rival firms with the same Wi-Fi password. It makes clear what you promise together, and where there is room for difference.
Because that is the point: simplicity does not mean everything becomes the same. Simplicity means difference has earned its place.
Focus on what connects
A good brand portfolio creates calm. Not the beige sort of calm where ambition goes to sleep and everyone starts saying “alignment” with a straight face. The strategic kind of calm, where customers understand faster why they should choose you, employees feel more clearly what they are building, and every expression adds weight to the same story.
That takes courage. Saying goodbye to a name can hurt. A name carries history. Memories. Internal pride. Sometimes even a cupboard full of mugs nobody quite has the heart to bin.
But a brand is not a museum for old decisions. It is a living system designed to help people choose, trust and connect.
So our standard for 2025 remains clear:
Unless the human drivers genuinely ask for something else.
Unless a separate brand builds more trust than confusion.
Unless difference is stronger than coherence.
In every other case?
Cut the noise. Build recognition. Make the story bigger than the separate labels.
The world is complicated enough already. Your brand portfolio does not need to make a spirited contribution.
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