Multi-Brand Strategy and Cohesive Digital Experiences
Building and maintaining brand identity and consistency is foundational for successful marketing. This might be foundational, but it can be difficult keeping a unified approach across teams, regions, audiences, and campaigns. Organizations with multiple sub-brands under one parent brand have an added layer of challenges in terms of brand strategy, but multi-brand marketing can drive broader global exposure and expansive business growth.
How can organizations with multiple brands present a consistent brand experience across their multiple digital ecosystems?
Use multi-brand strategy documentation as your guide
A brand strategy document should be your source of truth that lays the groundwork for marketing and design across your brands. Each brand under the multi-brand umbrella should have a more detailed version that focuses on the details of their sub-brand. But for true multi-brand coordination, the over-arching brand guide should be the starting point and should be updated annually (at minimum). Foundational elements include:
Overarching vision of the parent company
Rationale for multi-brand approach
Detail positioning for each brand
Target audiences for each brand
Brand overlap and cross-promotional strategies across brands
Brand differentiation
Parent brand visual identity
Brand guidelines for all brands
Coordinate design with a multi-brand design system
We’ve discussed the critical importance of design systems before. Multi-brand design systems can save large organizations thousands of design and development hours. Brands can share costs and have a built framework that lets their marketers create campaigns, enter markets, and introduce new products much faster than without a multi-brand design system.
More and more we’re seeing better documentation, discussion, and tools that support multi-brand design systems. If you’re moving from separate design systems (or no design system) to a multi-brand approach, it’s a big project but it’s easier now than ever before.
Regularly audit the digital experience from outside the brands
Even with the best tools and processes in place, keeping everything coordinated is hard, on-going work. One major mistake that many organizations make is keeping most digital marketing work separate at each brand level with little to no global marketing oversight. Ideally, your organization can have either a marketing team fully devoted to multi-brand marketing or have positions at the brand level where part of their role is multi-brand coordination, and they coordinate with the other brand reps.
If your organization structure or budget does not include multi-brand marketing focus and coordination, another smart option is to conduct regular (quarterly or annually) audits to analyze your multi-brand digital ecosystem. The audit can include:
Brand consistency (design, navigation, architecture, messaging)
Brand strengths and weaknesses
Market positioning
Cross site cannibalization and competition
Audience targets and user flows
Cross-promotional opportunities
If you’re moving towards a more coordinated multi-branding strategy approach or want to conduct a brand audit, Cimarron Winter can help. We’re digital experts who specialize in large complex ecosystems. Our team of marketing specialists can help you harness the power of consistent and effective global branding for more growth opportunities.