How do I adhere to Google's expectations for Organization schema when marking up a brand that has a parent company?

Question

I'm curious to the best approach of writing up structured data for a website that is for a brand of a parent company and its products.

Using the first example I could think of - Oreos are a brand of Nabisco.

Typically I'd have on my homepage structured data (JSON-LD) for Organization and WebSite. In this case, Oreos is more of a brand than it is an actual organization. So in this case:

• Would Nabisco be the organization with Oreos listed as a brand underneath?
• Would Oreos be an organization, that is considered a memberOf Nabisco?
• If Nabisco isn't mentioned anywhere on the Oreo website, would referencing the parent organization even be a good idea?

I know for most structured data on the site, I could handle it as usual (breadcrumbs, product, website, etc.) but for actually declaring that this website is for a brand of a parent company - I'm not sure what the best approach is (if any) to specify that.

Additional question:

• Say Oreos has social media accounts - this is something you would typically specify in Organization - So if you use Brand here in place of Organization, is the sameAs still applicable in the same way? Google documentation specifies it must go on Organization or Person.

Answer 1

Would Nabisco be the organization with Oreos listed as a brand underneath?

Well, according to Wikipedia, Oreo is the brand of Nabisco.

Would Oreos be an organization, that is considered a memberOf Nabisco?

Most likely it will be useful to use the property brand here.

If Nabisco isn't mentioned anywhere on the Oreo website, would referencing the parent organization even be a good idea?

Probably you should refer to a specific web page of Nabisco which represents this product / brand.

You can also use the property sameAs and the specified Wikipedia link as an identifier for this product.

Additionally, as an identifier of this product, you can use the property additionalType.

Example:

{   "@context":"https://schema.org/",   "@type":"Corporation",   "name":"Mondelēz International, Inc.",   "url":"https://www.mondelezinternational.com/",   "sameAs":"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondelez_International",   "brand":   {
    "@type":"Brand",
    "name":"Oreo",
    "url":"https://www.oreo.com/",
    "sameAs":"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo",
    "additionalType":"http://www.productontology.org/id/Oreo"   } }

Answer 2

There could be in my opinion just two goals regarding structured data:

1. to let Google display rich snippets and/or knowledge graph panel for branded search queries,
2. to provide as much as you can of structured data. Doing both you should relate on Google documentation about structured data kinds it prefers and understands.

In the case you describe i would structure data types like:

• -Organization
• --Brand
• --parentOrganization (or branchOf, or memberOf)
• ---Corporation

But this depends of the subject of the page (url), where the information is placed. Such information matches good to the startpage and/or imprint - i wouldn't place it on every page. For every other page it is fully enough to mention only the organization, which is the site owner.