The multi-brand strategy can be a great choice for your business if the products you develop are rather different or target different groups of customers. On the other hand, this kind of strategy can be more expensive and confusing. You’ll need to consider all its pros and cons carefully to decide whether this is the right path to your business success.
4 Things to Consider Before Choosing a Multi-Brand Strategy
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Will you benefit from the freedom of individual expression?
When you have multiple brands, you’ll have more freedom with your marketing campaigns as you’ll be able to develop a different approach for each. This will be harder to do because each plan will require a lot of work.
However, you’ll be able to develop the most efficient strategy for each brand and therefore get the maximum ROI. You will also be able to use data collected from all of these to develop much more efficient plans in the future.
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Can you ensure there’s no confusion in your ‘multi-business’?
The multi-brand strategy can be confusing for both yourself and your customers. This works out for some big companies, like Procter & Gamble, which have 23 individual brands under their name. However, smaller businesses might not have the ‘manpower’ to run such a complex structure smoothly.
To prevent confusion on your side, you’ll need to use a variety of managing solutions that will allow you to effectively run every marketing campaign without mix-ups. You will also need to use the right tools and hosting to manage more than one website.
To make sure your customers don’t get confused with your products, be sure to make the brands distinctive. Note that a multi-brand strategy can have completely independent names vaguely connected by the ‘mother brand’, like Procter & Gamble or Unilever. You can also have one major brand, which will have individual brands added to it, like Virgin Group Ltd. This will give you more credibility if your original brand is already established.
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Do you need extra-protection from failure?
One of the main advantages of the multi-brand strategy is that by having many separate brands, one failure doesn’t spell a complete disaster. Virgin Group Ltd. Is a great example of this considering some epic failures of Richard Branson’s brand, which are listed by Business Insider.
One brand’s failure might dunk your overall profits a bit, but it shouldn’t affect the other brands’ reputations severely. That’s why this strategy might be a good choice if you plan on launching some experimental products or even businesses.
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Do you strive to fill some market niche?
It’s wise to choose a multi-brand strategy of your ultimate goal is to fill some part of the market with your products. This will give you more benefits because of the sheer volume of your sales. Such an approach might also help push out the competition.
However, be aware that ‘brand cannibalism’ is one of the main problems of the multi-branding approach. This happens when your products start competing with each other, so your business loses a part of profits because of itself. To avoid this development, be sure to develop distinctive brands with a clearly defined target audience and price range. The point is to ensure they don’t infringe upon each other’s ‘territory’.
Use the same basic principle for deciding whether to choose the multi-brand strategy. If you can develop independent brands that will succeed individually, go for it. If your brands can’t independent enough, better stick to one.