AI tools shape how prospects discover and shortlist brands. The organisations that appear accurately in those answers are the ones with clear, well-structured brand architecture. This article examines why brand architecture has become critical infrastructure for visibility and ROI, drawing on research and our work rebuilding EMCOR UK’s brand into four propositions that every stakeholder, human or AI, can understand.

The way people discover brands has fundamentally shifted. Your prospects are no longer clicking through pages of search results to compare options. Instead, they’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for answers, and AI is making the choice for them.

And this is vitally import to you because

54% of users now start their searches with AI tools rather than traditional search engines,
47% of consumers have used AI to help make purchase decisions

For B2B marketers, the implications are profound. When a potential client or customer asks an AI assistant to “find me XXX companies in London,” your brand needs to appear in that response and be accurately represented.

Organisations with clear brand architecture achieve 3.5 times more visibility than those without it. (Harvard Business School)

And different large language models rely on different data sources and retrieval methods. Without a structured approach to how your brand and its offerings are organised and communicated, AI systems struggle to understand and accurately represent your value proposition.

Make your brand work harder to deliver ROI

Companies with well-defined brand architectures deliver superior stock returns, according to research.

Brand architecture delivers even greater advantages in B2B contexts. This is because

20% uplift in EBIT margin which illustrates how brand equity translates into greater profitability. (Mckinsey)
30% of a company’s market value comes from brand and reputation, underscoring the investor relevance of cohesive architecture. (PWC)
97% of B2B decision-makers say branding influences awareness and 95% say it drives differentiation, which is critical in long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles. (LinkedIn)
92% of buyers start with a shortlist and 41% already have a preferred vendor. To succeed, vendors must focus on building brand recognition and trust early to ensure they are on the initial shortlist. (Forrester)

Clarity over complexity

Brand architecture typically follows one of five models.

The branded house approach, used by companies like Apple, unifies all offerings under a single master brand identity.
The sub-brand system references the master brand and adds a unique product or service name, like car manufacturers do eg: the Toyota portfolio includes the Toyota Prius, Toyota Corolla etc…
The house of brands model keeps each brand entirely separate, as Unilever does with Dove and Persil.
The endorsed brand model allows sub-brands independence whilst maintaining a connection to the parent company.
The hybrid model blends these approaches based on specific business needs.

David Aaker, vice chairman of brand consulting firm Prophet, puts it simply: “The goal should be to have the fewest relevant brands needed to meet the business goals”. (Brand Portfolio Strategy, p.16) For most B2B service firms, it’s clarity over complexity every time.

Traditional SEO gave marketers clear metrics: rankings, impressions, click-through rates. AI-driven discovery operates differently. There’s no SERP position to track, no obvious signal that tells you whether ChatGPT is recommending your agency over competitors. Marketing teams are essentially blind to a channel that’s rapidly becoming dominant for discovery.

You can’t tell where your brand is being mentioned or how it’s being described across different AI platforms. You have very little insight into whether AI is reinforcing your intended positioning or subtly reshaping it.

The shift requires a fundamental rethink of brand visibility. Your brand needs to be understood by AI systems as a coherent entity with clear relationships between services, methodologies and client outcomes.

The EMCOR case study

Brand architecture is critical infrastructure. When your brand structure is clear, consistent and well-documented across all digital properties, AI models have the signal clarity they need to accurately represent you. When it’s muddled, AI fills the gaps with assumptions, or simply omits you from recommendations altogether.

We worked with EMCOR UK, a £240 million facilities services business employing 4,000 people across 14 service lines, to address exactly this challenge. Their existing brand architecture had become too complex to communicate clearly to employees, customers or AI systems.

We created coherent brand architecture by delivering a new strategic brand proposition and refining their model of 14 different services into four relatable, memorable propositions: Experience, Create, Enhance and Transform. The result: a brand structure that every stakeholder, human or AI, can understand and represent accurately.

Business impact

Following the 2020 rebrand, EMCOR UK entered a period of accelerated growth in specialist facility services culminating in the sale of the business to OCS Group for £190 million in December 2025. The 2016–2020 period had been characterised by steady, operational performance; the post-rebrand years delivered the focused strategic growth that made the business an attractive acquisition at significant value.

Read the full case study

Get AI brand ready

Start by auditing your current brand architecture. Ask yourself

Are the relationships between your parent brand, service lines and methodologies clear?
Is this clarity reflected consistently across your website, LinkedIn presence and case studies?
Most importantly, is it structured in ways that both humans and AI systems can parse and understand?

When every part of your brand portfolio has a clearly defined role and this structure is reflected consistently across all touchpoints, you create the conditions for both human understanding and AI comprehension.

For marketing leaders managing significant budgets and influencing major branding decisions, the calculus is straightforward. The brands that will maintain visibility in an AI-driven discovery landscape are those investing in clear, consistent brand architecture now.

How quickly can you audit, clarify and implement a structure that works for the AI systems rapidly becoming the primary interface between your brand and potential clients?

Audit your brand architecture – before AI does it for you

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director, FCIM

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 50 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’re ready to talk.

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It seems everyone wants a brand storyteller these days. But, perhaps what they really need is a brand architect?

In the year to 26 November 2025, the proportion of US LinkedIn postings using the word “storyteller” doubled, covering roughly 50,000 marketing roles and a further 20,000 in media and communications. Chime received over 500 applicants for a single storyteller opening. In the US, Google, Microsoft, even the National Wild Turkey Federation are all recruiting into the category. Accenture have an entire “storytellers team”, who exist to help C-Suite execs gain clarity on business challenges using a narrative framework.

And, according to WSJ, executive mentions of “storytelling” on earnings calls climbed from 147 in 2015 to 469 in 2025. That’s a 3.2x increase over a decade. It’s a steady upward trend for yarn spinners. When CFOs start using a soft word like “storytelling” in front of financial analysts, the narrative has clearly moved from the marketing department to the boardroom.

Most of the commentary around this trend has framed it as a communications story. Google frame it as a business development role: “As storytellers,” a recent Google Storyteller job ad said, “we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth.”

Either way, earned media is shrinking. Newsrooms are contracting. Brands now own their distribution, so they need to produce their own content. AI has flooded the channel with sloppy generic output. Audiences, particularly Gen Z are digital natives who value authenticity over all else.

And all of this, though true, is only one chapter of the story.

Risky Business

In our increasingly complex, interconnected, always on, multi-channel world, narrative is the only thing that holds a business together. It connects customers to suppliers, the through-line from front to back room staff, from C-suite to facilities.

Story is the connective tissue of a complex system. The corporate instinct to hire for storytelling is a reaction to the pressure modern business is under.

And reaction is where the risk lies.

Dropping a journalist into a campaign-driven marketing department is a 20th century response to a 21st century problem. It treats storytelling as a single-set problem with a single-set solution. Buy the skill. Fill the role. Produce the content.

“every piece of content a storyteller produces will read well in isolation and contradict itself in aggregate”

A storyteller can write an excellent case study. They cannot produce coherence across a complex organisation, if that organisation does not already know what it stands for. Without a clear strategic foundation, every piece of content a storyteller produces will read well in isolation and contradict itself in aggregate. The podcast will pull one way. The investor narrative will pull another. The internal comms deck will pull a third. Six months in, the business will have more content and less coherence than ever.

The need for a storyteller is the canary in the coalmine. A symptom of the failure of brand architecture.

Strategic brand architecture is the infrastructure that lets narrative survive contact with complexity. Providing positioning that is distinctive rather than descriptive, specific enough to brief every story the business tells. The set of strategic pillars that filter on-strategy stories from noise. It is the architecture that holds meaning across divisions, projects, platforms, and audiences.

“Strategic brand architecture is the infrastructure that lets narrative survive contact with complexity”

This is upstream work. It does not replace the storyteller. It makes the storyteller effective. Given architecture, a journalist can produce content that compounds. Without it, the same journalist will produce content that at best cancels itself out. At worst is completely dilutes and undermines the brand.

Happy Endings

Adura, the joint venture between Shell and Equinor, demonstrates this principle. Two complex, multinational parent organisations integrated under a single brand architecture with one coherent narrative. This start up JV was solid enough to unite multiple stakeholders and authentic enough to land a £3 billion credit facility, within months of launch. This is because every communication has a coherent brand platform to stand on.

“the brand story told itself once the brand architecture was right”

3Sixty Duty Free is the commercial transformation version of the same strategy. Founder Benny Klepach had a sprawling company on his hands. Designhouse created a coherent brand story and identity to support aggregate growth. Disparate brands, DFASS, Duty Free Air and Ship Supply, became 3Sixty Duty Free & More. A comprehensive brand designed to signal scale and increase market visibility.

Twelve months after the award-winning rebrand launched, Hotel Shilla, the Korean operator behind the world’s third largest travel retailer, announced a subscription to 44% of the share capital of 3Sixty Holding LLC. Industry analysts at The Moodie Davitt Report valued the deal at upwards of US$140 million. Shilla Travel Retail President Ingyu Han specifically cited 3Sixty’s “continued commitment to its strategic approach” as the trigger for finalising the investment, after previous negotiations had broken down two years earlier. The architecture did not just support the story. It unlocked the capital.

In both cases, the brand story told itself once the brand architecture was right.

The Moral Of This Story…

The WSJ numbers suggest that corporate storytelling is firmly on the boardroom agenda in 2026. The consideration for brand and marketing leaders is more fundamental than simply hiring a storytelling into the marketing team.

“turn a complex organisation into a coherent one”

The first question to ask – and answer – is whether the business has the strategic infrastructure to make the hire worthwhile. If you are applying 20th century brand architecture to solve for a 21st century complexity problem, a new hire, no matter how talented, will not help.

The storyteller is not the answer. The work is much further upstream, in the positioning and the architecture that turn a complex organisation into a coherent one. Get that right, and the stories take care of themselves.

written by Sam Steele, Marketing and Communications Director

Designhouse has partnered with FTSE 250 companies and global enterprises for over 55 years. We also work with start ups and scale ups to create brand identities that can grow with their business. If you’d like to discuss your brand challenges, we’d be glad to talk.