Henriette Viebig, EVP Brand & Communications, and Florian Schumann, VP Strategic Marketing & Sales, at Körber had a Q&A with Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Most of us who run marketing across more than one business line carry a quiet assumption about brand architecture. It gets decided once, usually during a rebrand, and after that it’s governance. You pick master brand or house of brands and spend the next ten years enforcing it.
Körber, the Hamburg-based technology group, has made the call in both directions inside five years. In 2020 it folded more than 40 individual company brands into a single Körber brand. In 2025 it sent its supply chain software business, a joint venture with KKR, to market as Infios, with only a small “a Körber company” endorsement tying it back to the parent. Henriette Viebig, EVP Brand & Communications, and Florian Schumann, VP Strategic Marketing & Sales, don’t see a contradiction in that. Their argument is that brand architecture is a business decision that has to be made again whenever the business changes shape. And the test for making it fits in one question.
One Brand Is a Decision, Not a Default
I opened by suggesting the master brand case had been settled wisdom in B2B for a decade. Viebig rejected the premise. Plenty of global B2B companies still win with multiple brands, she said. Körber’s 2020 move answered a specific problem: customers wanted end-to-end answers from a company that still looked like “a collection of separate specialist companies.” The group refreshed its positioning again in fall 2025.
Our position in 2026 is: a joint brand remains the right decision when it leverages commercially relevant meaning at the point of choice. It reduces complexity and should make stakeholders – customers, colleagues, and talent alike – more confident in the decision-making process. One name and one story are valuable when they give specialist expertise greater reach and coherence, while still allowing each market-facing offer to speak in its own precise language.
– Henriette Viebig
The phrase doing the work there is “at the point of choice.” It moves the test from whether the brand looks tidy to whether the name does anything when a buyer is deciding. So audit it that way. Pick recent deals from different business units and ask the account leads whether the parent name helped, hurt, or never came up. If it never came up, you’re paying for coherence the customer doesn’t register. Schumann adds a complication worth taking seriously. The value of one brand hasn’t dropped, he argues, but “the places where a brand must prove its value have multiplied.” Analyst reports, peer communities, review sites and AI-mediated research now shape the shortlist before anyone talks to sales. That’s where generative engine optimization stops being a search-team concern and becomes an architecture question. A parent brand that surfaces clearly in an AI answer about regulated pharma manufacturing is doing real work. One that surfaces vaguely everywhere may be doing less than a specialist name that shows up precisely in one place.
The Legacy Name Test
Consolidating 40-plus brands means some of them carried real brand equity with customers who’d bought from them for decades. Körber decided what to keep through a brand-by-brand analysis with internal experts, sales reps and, most importantly in Viebig’s telling, customers.
The decision rule followed a simple question: what role does this brand name play in the customer’s decision? … The threshold was practical, not sentimental: Does the legacy name still reduce buyer risk, improve findability, or signal a capability that the market actively searches for? If yes, preserve that equity where it belongs (in the offer architecture) rather than automatically keeping a separate niche brand alive.
– Henriette Viebig
That’s the most portable idea in the exchange, and it’s worth turning into a scorecard before your next acquisition closes. Note the parenthetical. A legacy name can survive as a product line without surviving as a company. In Körber’s case only a very small number of names were kept, either at product level or temporarily in communications. The rest went. By Schumann’s account, customers took it well from day one, and the harder transition was internal: sales and marketing people from 40 brands, each with its own pride, asked to carry a new name. During a pandemic, no less. Viebig describes the fix as treating the migration as “an organizational and commercial change, not merely a visual one,” with workshops, training, brand ambassadors and a step-by-step rollout instead of a big bang. Most consolidations spend heavily on design and launch. Körber’s experience says the money that matters goes to the people who’ll say the new name out loud in customer meetings.
When Independence Is Just Fragmentation
Then the counter-case. Infios runs opposite to everything above, so I asked them to argue against their own master brand. Schumann didn’t hedge: “we do not treat the joint brand as a religion.” Infios has a different ownership model, a focused software-market ambition and a distinct operating model, and a dedicated brand was clearer than “an extended corporate descriptor.” Viebig reframed the question as whether a separate identity helps the business win without confusing customers about the relationship. Then she added the warning most spin-out decks leave out.
Caution is important. Independence is expensive. A standalone brand must earn its own awareness, trust, talent pull, category authority and demand engine. If it is only a new logo on an unchanged, under-resourced go-to-market model, it is not independence — it is fragmentation.
– Henriette Viebig
I’d hand that paragraph to anyone arguing for spinning a unit out under its own name. The case for independence usually talks about focus and speed. It rarely prices what Viebig lists, which is building awareness, recruiting pull and a demand engine from close to zero. That shows up as a budget line, or it doesn’t show up at all. Körber ran market research and another round of team onboarding before the Infios launch, the 2020 playbook in reverse. It also kept the endorsement on the logo. Treated as a portfolio strategy decision rather than a design one, the question for an acquisition gets simpler. Is the ownership or operating model genuinely different, the way a private equity joint venture is? Will the unit get its own demand budget? If the answer to both is no, fold it in. As Viebig put it, brand architecture must follow business strategy.
Draw the Line Where the Accountability Sits
Group-level thought leadership is where diversified companies tend to produce content nobody reads, and Viebig’s answer was to narrow its job. Corporate thought leadership does its main work at the top of the funnel, building recognition for Körber as a technology company and an employer, and then hands off to the businesses. Schumann was blunt about when they stop: “Generic commentary on ‘innovation’ or ‘the future’ does not create awareness worth having.” On centralization, he gave the rule.
For Körber, this is not an abstract centralization-versus-decentralization debate. We have a joint brand, but we operate in markets with very different buying committees, sales cycles and proof requirements. The practical line is: centralize what customers and stakeholders should experience consistently from Körber; place market-facing demand generation where the customer and the commercial accountability sit.
– Florian Schumann
In practice, HQ owns positioning, guidelines, reputation, media relations and corporate thought leadership. The Business Areas own account priorities, customer proof, trade shows, sales enablement and lead generation, with a shared Digital Experience Team supplying tools and data. That gives a CMO a sorting test for every line in the budget: does this need to feel the same everywhere, or does it need to hit a pipeline number? Anything at the center measured on pipeline is probably in the wrong place. Anything in a business unit that’s supposed to build parent-brand recognition is probably underfunded, because the unit’s own targets will always win. One note. I also asked what they’d cut first from a group function, and they didn’t take that half of the question. The thought-leadership stop rule is the closest answer, and honestly it’s a decent one.
The assumption we started with, that architecture gets decided once, doesn’t survive Körber’s last five years. What replaces it is a standing question: what role does this name play in the customer’s decision? Körber asked it twice and got two different answers. The practical move is to pull a list of every brand name your company currently owns and put that question next to each one. Then get the answers from sales, not from the brand team.
