A client sent me a spreadsheet last week with nineteen tabs on it. Nineteen named things. Products, platforms, one thing that turned out to be a newsletter, and two that nobody in the meeting could confidently explain. The company employs about three hundred people. Somebody had color coded the tabs, which I found genuinely moving, because color coding is what we do instead of deciding.
I asked the simplest question available. Why does this one have its own name?
Silence, then four different answers, none of which agreed. The head of product said it was for a partner deal. Marketing said the founder liked it. Someone on the call said it had been spun out of a bigger thing in 2018 and never spun back.
Which is the actual finding, every time.
Every sub-brand in your portfolio exists because a specific person won a specific argument on a specific afternoon, and almost nobody has ever gone back to check whether that argument still holds.
Brand architecture gets taught as a taxonomy problem. House of brands, branded house, endorsed, hybrid, here are the boxes, pick one. That framing is useless in the room, because you are never choosing an architecture from scratch. You are excavating one that accumulated. The nineteen tabs are a sediment record of internal politics, and reading them as strategy is how consultants end up producing beautiful decks that change nothing.
The last eighteen months made this dramatically worse. Everyone launched things. Companies stood up new offerings in six weeks because the old business stopped working, and naming was the fastest way to make a scrambled response look intentional. Nobody kills a thing during a crisis. So the sprawl is now on the books and the crisis is receding and the spreadsheet has nineteen tabs.
Three questions cut through it faster than any framework. One, does a customer ever have to say this name out loud to buy something? Two, would revenue change if we retired the name and kept the product? Three, who specifically loses status when this name goes away, because that is the person who will fight you, and you should know their name before the meeting rather than after it.
The third question is the one nobody puts in the deck. It is also the only one that predicts what actually happens.
Nobody kills a thing during a crisis.
Marriott has done this well and painfully. Google has done it badly and repeatedly, and everyone reading this has watched a Google product get a new name it did not need. Both cost real money.
I got off the call, walked to Ovation for a second coffee, and came home to find Barnaby asleep on the printed portfolio map. Fair. It is the same nap either way.