Open an Emami product. Then open a Navratna cool oil. Then a BoroPlus cream. They look nothing like each other. Different colour palettes, different typography, different design languages entirely.
This is the “house of brands” architecture — the deliberate choice to run each brand as a standalone entity rather than building a unified “branded house” like Tata or Godrej.
Emami chose this because each brand occupies a distinct consumer segment. BoroPlus owns the antiseptic cream space — its consumers are value-seeking, practical, primarily in Uttar Pradesh and Bengal. Navratna targets a different demographic entirely — men who want “cool” scalp relief, with advertising built on mass-entertainment celebrities. Fair and Handsome (now Smart and Handsome) targets male grooming. Kesh King targets hair loss.
If Emami’s name appeared prominently on all of them, the brand associations would bleed into each other in ways that would confuse consumers and dilute each brand’s positioning.
The cost of this strategy is what brand strategists call “equity leakage.” Every rupee of marketing spend on BoroPlus builds BoroPlus — not Emami. If the brand ever needs to launch a new product, it starts from zero consumer recognition rather than leveraging a trusted house brand. And each brand must be maintained independently, which means higher overall marketing costs.
The opposite approach, Tata’s branded house gives every new product the benefit of Tata’s trust from day one. The tradeoff is that a scandal on one product can damage everything.
Neither is objectively correct. But every founder building a multi-product business should understand this tradeoff before they name their second product.
Takeaway
“House of brands” and “branded house” are two valid architectures with opposite tradeoffs. The right choice depends on how different your consumer segments are and how much you can afford to spend on maintaining separate brand equities.
