Connected mobility is changing what automotive businesses make, sell and ultimately become. Ahead of Connected Britain and IAA Transportation, I’ve been thinking about a deceptively simple brand question: as the car becomes an ecosystem, where should all that new value live?
One of the things I think about a lot in brand strategy is that businesses rarely stay neatly inside the structures they started with.
Products expand. Services appear. Technology that was once hidden becomes valuable in its own right. New audiences arrive. Before long, an architecture that once felt logical is no longer helping anyone understand what the core promise of the brand is, how all constituent parts deliver this is, and where the business is going.
That feels particularly relevant this September.
Connected Britain brings the UK connectivity industry together on 9–10 September. A few days later, IAA Transportation opens in Hanover, with software-defined vehicles, AI, autonomous transport, electrification and charging infrastructure among the themes shaping the conversation.
Both these events appear to be coming at the issue from different directions, but I think they expose the same underlying shift.
The vehicle is no longer just the vehicle.
It is becoming hardware, software, connectivity, data, services, interfaces, platforms and continually evolving functionality. When the business becomes more layered, then the branding question is to decide what deserves to be seen, what should stay in the background and what might become a valuable source of differentiation tomorrow.
Brand architecture is really a value decision
Brand architecture is sometimes treated as a tidying-up exercise. Seen as a matter of drawing boxes, then deciding what sits underneath them, and rationalising a few naming structures. But I think that greatly undersells it.
The harder and more useful question is not what should be branded but where should primary and future value live.
Working on connected automotive made that question particularly interesting because there are suddenly so many things that could carry equity: a software platform, connectivity service, operating environment, autonomous capability, charging offer, in-car experience, subscription service, proprietary component or innovation programme and more.
Brand all of it and the customer ends up navigating a taxonomy. Hide all of it and the business may bury some of its most valuable points of difference.
Good architecture must make the present understandable while anticipating and making room for future growth.
Cubic³: sometimes the smartest move is subtraction
I saw this very clearly in our work with Cubic³.
Formerly Cubic Telecom, the business had evolved well beyond the role people associated with it. It had become a software-first connectivity partner to major global OEMs, but the market still often misunderstood it as just a telco. At the same time, cluttered products, services and disparate naming conventions had accumulated around the business.
The answer was not to invent more brands to make the business feel more sophisticated. It was to streamline to make a clearer architecture work harder.
We rationalised the product structure, simplified naming and concentrated more meaning in the Cubic³ masterbrand and its Powerfully Smart Connectivity proposition.
What I like about our solution is that simplification did not mean flattening everything. Before it existed, we devised and created space for Cubic³ Labs as a place where future intelligence and innovation could be expressed without fragmenting the core offer again.
For me, an important principle is to reduce clutter but preserve room for meaningful future difference.
Mahindra: sometimes the smartest move is separation
Mahindra presented almost the reverse problem.
The automotive brand already carried enormous equity in India, particularly around rugged ICE SUVs. When Mahindra began developing its first electric-origin vehicles, there was an obvious route to house EV underneath the established automotive offer, but we felt that would limit what these new vehicles could become.
The interesting insight was not simply that they were electric. The experience was moving closer to consumer technology and lifestyle. The operating system, connected media, sound, interfaces and in-car environment opened a very different set of expectations from the traditional automotive cues Mahindra had built its reputation on.
So, we crafted a distinct Mahindra EV category with enough independence to create new meaning especially among new aspiring audiences, while retaining the confidence of the Mahindra name behind it.
Then the architecture had to work top to bottom: the EV category, BE and XEV marques, INGLO hardware, MAIA software, individual models, features and advanced technology components.
In other words, the structure was not there to make the organisation chart look tidy. It was there to create the conditions for different kinds of value to be understood and built over time.
The commercial results were significant: more than 30,000 bookings on the first day, worth nearly $1bn, followed by rapid deliveries and strong e-SUV market share.
There is no single “right” architecture
This is why I’m cautious when brand architecture is reduced to a choice between branded house, house of brands and a few standard diagrams.
Cubic³ needed more consolidation. Mahindra needed more separation. Both answers were right because they followed the business problem rather than the framework.
The things I want to understand first are more practical.
- What are customers trying to navigate?
- Where does existing equity help us?
- Where does it get in the way?
- Which capabilities could become meaningful sources of preference?
- What will the business need to add next?
- And where do we want future value to accumulate?
Those questions are becoming more urgent as automotive, connectivity and technology converge.
A supplier can become a software company. A vehicle can become a service platform. A hidden component can become a branded experience. Something that looks like an internal technology label today can become tomorrow’s differentiator.
Architecture must leave room for that possibility without giving everything a logo.
Building for what comes next
That thinking sits behind our Brand Architecture Sprint.
The purpose is not to arrive with a pre-drawn model. It is to get leadership, commercial, product and brand teams around the same problem, and to collaboratively work out what should lead, what should support, what needs its own identity and what should disappear.
I want the output to make the business easier to understand now, but also to leave deliberate space for what it might become next. Because for me, brand architecture isn’t about deciding where names sit, it’s about deciding value lives.
Connected Britain and IAA Transportation are good reminders of why that matters. Connectivity and automotive are not simply becoming more technologically sophisticated. They are becoming harder to define using the categories and structures we inherited from the past.
We will come back to that in our next Connected Auto special, looking more broadly at how software, data and connected experiences are changing what automotive brands need to be, and where their next sources of competitive difference may come from.
Simplify complexity.
Talk to us about our Brand Architecture Sprint, designed to clarify what leads, what supports and where future value should live
Gain insight.
Follow Dusted for our forthcoming feature on how software and technology are reshaping brand experience across mobility.