Platform Development to Support Multiple Brands

Modular product portfolio architecture to maximize shared systems/components among products is increasingly popular in product development for reasons of economy of scale and scope. Product development is no longer sufficient to consider only a single product. Instead, it must also consider the needs of a brand family or portfolio. One of the main challenges in designing multiple brands from the same product platform is the ability to create a group of distinctive product variants to support their individual brand images while maximizing system/component commonality among them. Making a proper decision of product platform and necessary differentiation is, indeed, a complex and crucial task. A systematic approach for designing a modular product portfolio architecture to support multiple brands-to maximize brand differentiations as well as product commonization-is still largely unexplored. This is evident by the facts that different companies are employing disparate and inconsistent platform development approach. The development of a practical, useful, and sound framework on how to develop a modular product architecture in the context of brand portfolio is the unique and original contribution of this thesis. This includes the creation of a set of platform and modular architecture principles (i.e., dominant theme of product functions and aesthetic forms, brand signature, and platform rules) and tools, such as the brand function structure and modularity matrix to complement the existing modular product portfolio architecture approach. The framework was developed based on applicable research on consumer responses to product characteristics, functional architecture methodology to define possible product platforms, and an empirical "listening to customers" automotive case study to understand necessary brand differentiation and acceptable brand parity. The integrative framework, combining brand portfolio management and product portfolio architecture development, proposed in this thesis is essential to deliberately engineer necessary product differentiation to deliver unique brand identity in the mind of customers, while taking advantage of the economy of scale of a product platform commonization. The applicability of the methodology was evaluated using several cases where multiple brands were developed from common product platform.