Brand architectures grow in one direction and are corrected in bursts. The expansion is driven by internal incentives and the correction by the cost those names impose on buyers.
Every team wants a name
A named product is easier to fund, staff and defend internally. The name signals that the thing is real and has an owner.
Nobody inside the company is accountable for the total number of names, so each individual decision looks reasonable.
Over several years this produces a portfolio where the naming reflects the organisation chart rather than anything a customer perceives.
Each name has to be paid for
A brand is not a word, it is an accumulated set of associations. Building those requires sustained spend and time.
Splitting a fixed budget across more names means none of them accumulates enough exposure to become known.
The parent brand also weakens, because the activity that would have reinforced it is credited elsewhere.
Buyers carry the cost of the structure
A prospect encountering four product names has to work out how they relate, which of them they need, and whether they overlap.
That work is done before any purchase and most people abandon it rather than complete it.
Descriptive naming avoids the problem entirely, since a plainly described product needs no explanation of where it sits.
Sales teams absorb the same cost on every call, spending the opening minutes mapping names to needs before any discussion of the purchase can begin.
The cull arrives with a new arrival or a merger
Consolidation typically follows a leadership change or an acquisition, because both create a moment where the structure is examined as a whole.
The correction usually goes further than necessary, collapsing names that were genuinely doing work alongside those that were not.
Names worth keeping are the ones a customer would ask for by name. Everything else is internal vocabulary that escaped.
The test that prevents both extremes
A new name is justified when the thing addresses a different buyer, sits in a different competitive set, or must survive the parent being sold.
Where none of those apply, a descriptor under the existing brand delivers the same clarity without creating an asset that needs feeding.
Applying that test at the point of naming is far cheaper than applying it during a consolidation, when customers have already learned the names being removed.