A brand goes through a life cycle from inception to launch to promotion. Businesses carefully plan their strategies by choosing the right content, graphics, images, and comments to create their own brand identity. Businesses similarly follow their media strategy with the help of branding and packaging design agency to reach their target audience. Let’s learn if your company has multiple brands, how can you project multiple brand identities at once and persuade your audience?
What Is A Multi-Brand Strategy?
Multinational conglomerates with multiple brands typically seek to adopt a strategy of promoting them all simultaneously in one campaign. This process is known as a multi-brand digital marketing solution or advertising strategy. The multinational conglomerate spends huge advertising and media budgets to build its parent company’s brand image and raise awareness.
The audience can easily identify and associate with such brands and companies. Therefore; companies with a strong brand image can expand their portfolio by launching new brands or brands as extensions of existing brands. Further, companies looking to pursue a multi-brand strategy can save a lot of money and effort. They depend on the company’s brand image to promote their new brand.
Is Multi-Branding Limited To Large Companies?
Amazon, for example, is an e-commerce giant that needs no introduction. It expanded its reach from retail ecommerce to Twitch, a video live streaming service. Most recently, it acquired MGM Studio.
Amazon owns brands such as:
- Amazon Fresh
- Amazon.com
- Prime Now
- Prime Pantry
- Amazon Go
- Whole Foods Market
Through this it promotes a countless of private label products. Therefore, for such conglomerates, a multi-brand strategy makes sense.
Types of Multi-Branding
The marketer is interested in pursuing the two prominent forms of multi-brand strategy.
- Brand House
- House of Brand
Brand House
Brand House is one of the common brand architecture models used by multi-brand companies. Here, the alphabet is the parent company of Google and offers multiple sub-brands such as Chrome, Gmail, Meet, and Workspace. Google also offers various sub-products to facilitate Google functionality, such as, Google Drive for storing data, and Google Docs and Sheets for easy sharing of files and data virtually. Therefore, sub-brands co-exist with the main brand, so Google does not need to publish each sub-brand. No wonder Google has adopted a multi-brand strategy.
House of Brand
When a company owns multiple brands and each of these brands retains a separate identity and competes with each other for the market share externally, it is called a house of brands.
The multinational company Unilever manufactures an extensive range of products including fabric care, baby care, grooming, feminine care, home care, hair care, personal health care, skin and body care, and oral care products. Each category has multiple brands that compete with market forces on brand strength and personality. Unilever promotes brand names such as Dove, Rexona, Ax, and Lifebuoy to project the multi-ethnic and culturally diverse image of consumers of skincare products. Each of these brands, unlike others, does not rely too much on its parent company for its market presence.
Multi-Branding Vs. Multi-Product Branding
Multi-branding and multi-product branding often intersect, but there are different branding strategies.
A multi-brand strategy consists of a parent company with products or product lines that target different target audiences. For example, a line of cars is a classic real-life example. Ford, for example, has a well-known brand name car and a subset of cars under its umbrella.
Multi-product branding is unlike t a company that practices one brand name for all of its products. For example, Sony makes a wide variety of digital products, where consumers see the Sony name on TVs, game consoles, and more. According to a survey about 71% of buyers like co-branding partnerships.
Multi-product branding has benefits such as increased brand awareness and reduced advertising efforts, but it can lead to issues such as product dilution.
Businesses must keep up with their evolving customer base as their brands evolve. They should consider which multi-strategies are most beneficial as your product or service changes.
Multi-Brand Strategy Trends
Several e-commerce trends are impacting the current e-commerce landscape, making multi-brand strategies attractive to more players. Here are the important strategy trends of e-commerce.
From B2C to D2C
The rise of Direct to Consumer D2C has reduced the difficulty of introduction and upholding multiple brands. Eliminating middlemen (that is, retailers or resellers) means companies can experiment with branding and get to market much faster. The rapid increase in the number of companies that manufacture, advertise, sell, and ship their own goods is changing the e-commerce landscape.
The D2C business model allows the supplier to control the entire process, often allowing the supplier to deliver a superior end-to-end brand experience. Therefore, the company manages everything from creating successful products, engaging audiences, marketing products, delivering goods, communicating with customers and owning experiences.
By cooperating directly with consumers, Direct to consumer providers can assemble customer data and address issues without wholesalers slowing things down. And while 80% of traditional retailers saw sales drop during the pandemic, 52% of D2C brands saw demand surge instead. This success is due to the agility of this approach, leading to the following trends.
Long Lead Times to On-Demand Production
China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse has spurred the growth of e-commerce, and today, it’s easier than ever to find a manufacturer. This shows it takes no time to build a brand from scratch than before with the help of these trends and turn them into useful products.
Let’s take an example of the fashion industry. Those days no longer exist when fashion years consisted of summer, spring, fall, and winter collections. Instead, the winning brands are the new brands that not only launch new products in response to new trends and demands but respond to them.
They develop small “point solutions” for precisely defined niche target groups and scale quickly. One example is Amazon. Amazon sets in all the data and manages its own multi-brand commerce strategy, creating low cost promotional products when categories are doing well.
Physical Stores to Distribution Models and Advanced Logistics
Sales will become one of the most important aspects of e-commerce in the future. The need for brick-and-mortar retail space continues to decline as brands progressively adopt logistics and distribution systems which saves their costs and delivers a better buyer experience.
Remember, greater efficiency requires more inventory, further reducing physical space requirements. Options like drop transport and AI-primarily based to make it even simpler to launch, test, and optimize new brands.
Static Websites for Shopping Experiences
The success of the brand is completely based on the following factors.
A core purpose is a thoughtful key customer goal and an excellent brand experience. This last element is important in digital commerce, where customers interact with brands across multiple touchpoints. A strong brand ensures a consistent message by optimizing the customer’s journey to enhance brand value, perception, and performance. However, you need to maintain consistency across your digital customer experience.
Your brand influences every point in your prospect’s conversion funnel. So just, don’t just measure clicks as a KPI. According to the June 2021 BrandTotal survey, 79% of respondents said they discovered a brand they had never heard of through sponsored posts that led to a purchase, and 84% of those who discovered new products purchased it within the last 3 months.
These multi-brand strategies are highly operational as strong brands continuously show outclass performance of the brands. These approaches must be implemented to stay ahead of the competition. Here, being up to date has value. A McKinsey study found that companies that are brand innovators grow sales four percent faster than those that are not.
How Do Companies Adjust Such Strategies?
Every brand tells a story that speaks to the audience they are designed to reach. Brands typically use image, language, content and context to connect with their intended group emotionally. You need to choose a representative and an influential leader who can tell that story.
Examples of Multi-Branding
Companies that are running successful multi-branding strategies can get assistance from established brand equity. Here are a few examples of the parent brands that are establishing multi-branding strategies.
- Snuggle Up
- Procter & Gamble
- L’Oréal
Advantages of Multi-Branding
A multi-brand strategy has several advantages, such as
Multi-branding gives companies the potential to become market leaders.
- Multi-branding offers an opportunity to expand shelf space and shelf life of products.
- You can offer different options to your customers in a potentially saturated market.
- Brand reputation is affected when the brand is seen as a trusted vendor.
Conclusion
Today’s consumers expect a frictionless and seamless experience no matter where they are in the world, which channel they use, or which brand in their portfolio they buy. This requires businesses to choose branding solutions technologies that manage the entire customer lifecycle, collecting all touchpoints and data in the same system.
Companies can build relationships, interact with customers, track, manage, and track sales based on trust and minimized risk, whether customers stop by a brick-and-mortar store to return merchandise or browse your website in the middle of the night. You have to close the deal. If your company is looking for a solid strategy of multi-branding then get in touch with us. We provide comprehensive digital marketing services like custom website design, mobile app design services, and more.