Consolidating a sprawl of product brands and regrouping them by buyer segment (1992)

Tidying the names, or rationalising development?

The core of this decision is that it re-sorted, in a market that had entered maturity, the proliferation of product names that expansion had produced. A structure in which three design departments generated products in competition with one another created development energy, but behind it swelled the product line to 28 names for detached houses alone, which if anything blurred the outline of each individual brand. Rebundling the brands by buyer segment rather than by price band can be seen as an attempt to recover appeal without throwing away the fruits of that diversification.

Even so, the reorganisation at this point went no further than putting the product names into families; it did not reach into cutting the number of products themselves or the parts count. As the qualified “in the future” in managing director Urushitani’s words suggests, whether the brand tidy-up could be carried through into a rethink of the cost structure remained a question for later. Played into a headwind of weakness in the Tokyo metropolitan market and deteriorating financial income and expenses, whether this move ended as a mere renaming or extended into the rationalisation of development and production looks like the fork in the road on which the management of Sekisui House would afterwards be judged.