Ritson is right about WPP — but he is using the wrong map
The model that has governed brand architecture thinking since 1996 is no longer relevant, argues Nathan Birch, founder of Strategic Brand Partners. The friction of cost that forced hard choices made this previous model useful, but this has been engineered out of existence. And nobody has updated the framework since.
Nathan Birch - author
I’ve never met Mark Ritson, though we’re from the same part of the world — that flat, forthright stretch of England were calling out balderdash is considered a civic duty. He levelled his acerbic wit at Interbrand a few years ago when I was CEO in Australia and we published a thought piece on the “end of positioning.”
He responded with a line I have been dining out on ever since: “Why do they insist on tearing down the cathedrals of marketing and replacing them with bouncy castles that smell of piss.”
RELATED: WPP: A case study in how not to do brand architecture
By writing this, I am almost certainly about to find out what that smells like from the inside. Though I’d observe, in my defence, that more people today enjoy bouncy castles than cathedrals. The democratisation of architecture, you might say.
So, I read with great interest his diagnosis of the WPP Creative debacle over the past month. It is accurate. Taking three of the most valuable names in the agency business — Ogilvy, VML, AKQA — and sliding them beneath a masterbrand named after a wire basket manufacturer is not strategy. It’s a cost play wearing a press release. Cindy Rose needed a visible first move. She made one. Whether it was the right one is a different question.
But here’s where the good Doctor Ritson — and I deploy the honorific with the maximum deference I can muster — and almost everyone writing about this, loses the thread.
We all defer to the Aaker spectrum. “Branded House” versus “House of Brands” – the model that has governed brand architecture thinking since 1996, when David Aaker published what became the field’s foundational text. It is a perfectly good framework — for 1996. It was built observing portfolios of a particular era, under particular economic conditions, with a particular assumption baked quietly into every page: that brands are expensive to create, slow to build, and consequential to add.
My bugbear is now that assumption is now dead.
A brand today costs a Canva subscription, an AI logo generator, and forty minutes of mild concentration. You can have a sub-brand by Tuesday. You can have three by Thursday. In the late nineties, a business might have added one or two brands in a year, each one a considered commitment. Now it can create a dozen in a month, each one a casual decision. The friction that made the Aaker model useful — the friction that forced executives to choose, because choice was costly — has been engineered out of existence. And nobody in-house or agency has updated the theory to account for it.
The result is CMOs and creative agencies still arguing about where on a thirty-year- old spectrum a brand should sit, while the actual problem their CEOs face is something different entirely: brand portfolios are growing faster than the strategic thinking about them, with brands multiplying like unsupervised interns, each one cheap to launch and expensive to manage in aggregate.
This is not a question of Branded House or House of Brands. It is a question of portfolio dynamics — how your brands interact with each other, not how each brand stands alone. The relevant analogy is not brand management. It is portfolio theory. What is the correlation between these brands? Does adding a brand to your book hedge your existing exposure or concentrate it? What does the brand portfolio return look like when you account for the drag of brands that are consuming attention without generating distinct value?
The good Doctor looks at Ogilvy and says: that name has equity, protect it. He is correct. But is everyone looking at a single-stock question and not considering the portfolio problem. WPP’s issue is not whether Ogilvy et al has equity. It is what the combined risk-return profile of running Ogilvy, VML and AKQA as genuinely separate competing brands looks like in a market where AI is compressing the margins that funded the separation in the first place.
That is a harder question. It doesn’t fit neatly on a spectrum between two poles. It requires a different instrument.
I’ve been developing one — a proprietary framework that approaches portfolio architecture the way a fund manager approaches asset allocation: not brands on a spectrum, but brands as a system, evaluated for correlation, concentration risk, and portfolio-level efficiency. It asks different questions because the problem has changed. More on that another time.
For now, the point is this: WPP probably made the wrong call. But they were asking the right question. The tragedy is that as the internal brand experts handed them a thirty-year-old map and called it current.
David Ogilvy deserves better than WPP Creative. He also deserves better than a framework that stopped evolving the year the first iMac shipped.
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I think you’ve conflating the costs of creating vs costs of building. The thing you can generate in an afternoon is a brand identity. The true cost is (and always has been) building equity in that brand (vs. sharing the equity already created from an existing brand)
You can ‘create’ a brand logo in minutes – that’s not the same as creating and building an actual brand that means something to anyone, or is worth anything.