Not everything needs a logo.
How I helped turn a sprawling portfolio into a clearer brand—and created the rules to keep it that way.
I'd spent enough time explaining the problem.
In Analyst and Advisor Relations, I spent a lot of time making complex technology portfolios understandable to people outside the company.
One portfolio in particular made that unnecessarily difficult.
It had accumulated more than 160 individually named pieces of intellectual property, many with their own logos. Before I could explain the value behind the technology, I often had to explain what each name represented and how the offerings fit together.
Imagine being a customer encountering it for the first time. Was this a platform, a product, or a feature? How did it relate to all the other things with equally impressive names? Our own sellers faced the same challenge.
The names were getting in the way of the story.
I wanted to change the story—not just explain it better.
When I stepped into the Head of Content role, I was eager to tackle that problem at its source.
I pushed for an enterprise-wide rethink of the portfolio. Leadership ultimately backed the coordinated effort I'd been advocating, bringing teams together to take stock of the offerings and align on a much simpler architecture built around a handful of core platforms.
The point wasn't to diminish what anyone had built. It was to make those capabilities—and their value—easier to understand.
But how did we end up with 160 brands in the first place?
Nobody had set out to create a confusing portfolio.
Individual teams were proud of their innovations, and giving something a distinctive name seemed perfectly reasonable. The problem was that those decisions accumulated without a consistent framework for determining what actually deserved its own brand.
And unless we changed that, we'd eventually end up right back where we started.
So I authored our sub-brand governance framework: when a distinct identity was justified, what business case it required, and how Marketing and Legal should review new names. I also proposed a Brand Council and helped teams understand the reasoning behind the rules.
Instead of starting with “What should we call it?”, we could start with “Does this actually need its own brand?”
What changed?
We established a clearer brand architecture, a more consistent way to communicate it, and a repeatable process for future naming decisions. Adoption wasn't perfect, but we had a way to make the next decision—not just a tidier list of names.
That effort was part of a broader 2023 global brand refresh, which I had also advocated for. I served as its content and messaging lead, helping shape our corporate narrative, verbal identity, voice and tone, and how the brand was expressed across our website and communications. Design, digital and other partners brought complementary expertise to the transformation.
A more coherent portfolio needed a more coherent company story, too.
The wider company's brand trajectory was also striking:
- AA− → AA+ Brand Finance brand-strength rating, 2022–2025
- $519M → $824M estimated brand value, 2022–2025
- Global Top 25 IT services brands for the first time in 2025
Those company-level milestones reflect many teams and business factors, not the portfolio work or my role alone.
The takeaway
Cleaning up complexity is satisfying. Changing the decisions that created it is better.
And while I appreciate a clever name as much as anyone, not every good idea needs a logo.