Multi-brand firms, or holding companies, are businesses that own a portfolio of different brands. These companies offer an avenue of growth and increased market share, but they also come with their own set of challenges. The biggest challenge that multi-brand firms face is how to effectively manage the marketing of all their brands at the same time. This is where multi-brand marketing comes in. Multi-brand marketing is a strategy used to create synergy between all the brands within the company and empower each one to be a marketing hero.
Having multiple, separate brands allows a company to reach different customer segments and capitalize on varying market trends. Think of some restaurant-holding firms that can have a chicken, burger, and pizza label and cover the gamut of your fast-food cravings. Or a fashion group that can cover someone from high school to retirement. With such a wide range of offerings, these brands can tap into various customer segments and provide solutions tailored to their individual needs.
Another benefit of a multi-brand firm is that it allows for distributed marketing efforts. Companies can share resources and leverage different channels such as email marketing and content marketing to reach customers by creating and managing multiple brands under the same umbrella. This helps them reach more people and build stronger relationships with their customers. Ultimately, this leads to increased sales and greater brand recognition.
The challenge is, that despite now being part of a bigger entity, the individual firms have history, resources, and processes. Anyone who’s been part of a merger will have heard the dreaded phrase, “that’s not how we do it here”. Though the bane of every change agent, it can also be a way of saying, “our firm is unique, and we’ve figured out how to communicate with our clients”. The opportunity of saving money by consolidating vendors often goes against the grain of marketing and operations who will have to reconfigure their workflow all while maintaining a current state.
Teach your co-workers well
When discussing email marketing for a multi-brand firm, we should consider the bifurcating tiers of resources. Let’s consider a made-up multi-brand firm Saassy, which has seven brands focused on women from high school to retirement. Their marquee brand has over 800 locations selling fast casual clothing for post-college women (Låne) while their smallest brand has 80 target shops in exclusive malls selling elegant clothes for women over 50 using high-quality materials (kvalitet). We can assume Låne has a full marketing team creating bespoke emails based on complex personalization models, whereas kvalitet may have a catch-all marketing manager sending sporadic emails off Constant Contact. What happens when Saasy decides that all the brands need to migrate to a single ESP and send consistent messaging in timing and look/feel? One could assume Låne would be able to quickly pivot, whereas kvalitet would most likely struggle as their team isn’t staffed to support a comprehensive customer engagement platform and the required volume of emails to find success.
In kvalitet’s case, migrating from Constant Contact to a state-of-the-art ESP is like going from driving a scooter to a Ferrari. We must ensure that we don’t set up our teams for failure. A simplified distributed marketing solution, which sits on top of the fancy customer engagement platform, will allow the kvalitet marketing manager to create emails utilizing approved templates, share a common calendar, institute an approval process, and succeed. If the system is adopted holding company-wide, the collective can learn from one another and adopt best practices quickly.
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