On the weekend, I recognised a book cover I’d never seen before.
I’d mistaken The Adults by Alison Espach for The Wedding People.
I hadn’t recognised the title, or even registered the author’s name. But something in the illustration and lettering felt familiar enough that my brain had made the connection.
I’d recognised a relationship. I’d just got the relationship wrong.
Which made me think about brand architecture. Riveting Saturday inner dialogue, I know.
As brand strategists, we spend a lot of time working out how brands should relate. Which one leads? Which supports? What should stand alone? Where are we ultimately trying to build equity?
Publishing makes the distinction between organisational hierarchy and brand architecture particularly obvious.
It looks something typically like this:
Publisher → Imprint → Author → Series → Title
Whereas, that’s rarely (if ever) what we see on the shelf.
A publisher might technically sit at the top, yet be consigned to a discreet edge of spine. Meanwhile, for a debut author with little existing recognition, the title may do most of the work.
The organisational hierarchy tells us how the business is structured. Brand architecture helps determine which of those relationships should be meaningful to an audience.
And even then, what we intend isn’t necessarily what an audience sees.
A reader might navigate by:
Author → Title
Or:
Series → Title
Or, in my case:
Familiar visual world → “Hey, I know this” → Book
A visual system plays a big role in moving from what we intend with architecture to what someone actually perceives through that architecture.
An author’s name may dominate the cover, connecting a new release to their backlist. A shared typeface or illustration style might signal that next book in a series. A publisher’s mark might provide a subtler cue of curation or style of writing.
Which brings me back to The Adults.
The similarity between the covers both helped and confused me. It transferred enough recognition from one book to another to make me stop and pick it up. But it also made the relationship ambiguous: for a moment, I thought one book was the other.
In this case, the consequences were negligible. And given that I picked up another book by the same author, perhaps that ambiguity was the publisher’s intention all along.
Working out how brands should relate is only part of the job. The visual system we put around them is how we articulate the strength of those relationships.
There’s another useful test we need to keep top of mind:
If someone never saw the brand architecture diagram, would they understand the relationship in the way we intended?
Brand architecture needs to survive contact with the audience, not just make sense inside the organisation.
