How our brand designers manage Industry Dive’s 30+ brands

Taylor McKnight
2 min readSep 17, 2022

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Creating and maintaining a brand architecture that works across many publications, products, and audiences can be challenging.

At Industry Dive, our Brand & Marketing Design team, led by Michelle Rock, leverages multiple strategies to achieve this:

“Branded house” with sub-brands

  • This strategy involves marketing sub-brands under the umbrella of our parent brand.
  • Each of our brands has the same visual identity — typography, color palette, and logo design.
  • We use this highly-scalable branding approach for our 25 business news publications, like Retail Dive and Utility Dive, and revenue products, like DiveWire and DiveMarketplace.
  • We want to ensure that business leaders and potential clients can quickly identify an Industry Dive news publication or product. In addition to building massive brand equity, this approach also makes it easier for us to brand new pubs and products.

“House of brands”

  • This strategy involves marketing brands on their own, independent of our parent brand.
  • Each of these brands typically has its own unique typography, color palette, and logo design.
  • We use this approach for many of our acquired publications and products. We rarely rebrand them to “Dive” for various reasons; many of these acquired pubs and products have unique editorial or revenue models. Also, we do not want to lose the historical brand equity built over the years with existing audiences/users. Instead of rebrands, we typically do small brand updates to realign acquired pubs and products with our overall brand identity standards.

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Taylor McKnight

VP of Design at $500M business media company | Follow me for posts about leadership, management, and design