Ever increasing demands of the cutting industry towards better cutting performances require ongoing development of the used tools. The life-time and performance of such cutting tools can be enormously increased by the application of hard protective coatings, which are commonly synthesized via physical vapor deposition. The aim of this thesis is to establish the fundamentals to enable a further development of well-established transition metal nitride based coatings with enhanced properties. In order to determine the impact of different design approaches on the coating properties, the utilization of advanced characterization methods is crucial. Within this thesis, two different design concepts were investigated. The first approach was the alloying concept, where Al or both, Al and Ta were added to TiN and the impact on different coating properties was studied. With time-domain thermoreflectance the thermal conductivity of Ti1-x-yAlxTayN coatings was determined, since a low thermal conductivity of the coating is important to shield the tool material effectively from the heat arising in cutting processes. Increasing Ta contents lead to a lower thermal conductivity, which was attributed to the smaller grain size and increased alloy scattering. Further, micro-mechanical bending tests were performed to determine the fracture behavior of Ti1-xAlxN coatings with increasing Al content. Coatings exhibiting a single phase face-centered cubic (fcc), a mixed fcc and wurtzitic (w), and a single phase w-structure were synthesized and tested. With increasing Al content, the fracture properties could be increased, as long as the w-phase fraction was only minor. A dominating w-phase led to a deterioration of the mechanical properties. The second approach was a combination of the alloying concept and the deposition of a multilayer architecture. In doing so, the fracture properties of Ti1-x-yAlxTayN single and multilayer coatings were studied in detail. However, it was demonstrated that the alloying concept has a stronger impact on the fracture properties than the multilayer architecture for the here investigated coatings. Since the determination of the local elemental composition of multicomponent coatings is of highest interest, especially to study decomposition or segregation effects with close to atomic resolution, atom probe tomography (APT) gains increasing importance. However, the results of APT can be strongly influenced by the applied measurement parameters. Thus, detailed studies on suitable measurement parameters are essential. In this thesis, CrN and Cr1-xAlxN model coatings were used to illuminate the influence of different laser parameters on the determined elemental composition of metastable systems. With increasing laser pulse energy, for both coatings a decrease of the N content was detected. For CrN even a decomposition of the coating was observed when high laser pulse energies were applied. Thus, low laser pulse energies are necessary to ensure accurate results for metastable systems. Concluding, the application of advanced characterization methods is essential to gain a thorough understanding of the impact of different design concepts on the coating properties, allowing a further improvement even of well-established coating systems.