Redefining your multi-brand strategy

In the best restaurants, every dish is a unique experience — but the ingredients, tools, and processes used to create them are shared. The same flour that goes into the soufflé also goes into the tart, the same eggs that go into the omelette also go into the crème brûlée. 

For restaurant owners, it’s a question of balancing resources with the creativity and vision of the chefs. And when it works, restaurants build a fiercely loyal customer base who come back again and again for new experiences, and even tell their friends. 

But now the restaurant has to accommodate more guests, with different tastes, all of whom want a great experience too. So, the restaurant has to find a way of managing that demand — maybe by hiring new chefs, creating new dishes, or opening a new location. And, if it can’t manage, and can’t sustain the quality of the experience, diners leave disappointed. 

What does that have to do with digital content marketing? 

Well, businesses face a similar problem when they own and manage multiple brands under one corporate umbrella. While each brand builds a relationship with customers with its “flavor”, the parent company has to find shared efficiencies as it rolls digital content out to the different customer populations in order to make its corporate infrastructure profitable and sustainable over the long term. 

In other words, they have to develop a multi-brand strategy that facilitates the individual digital experiences they create for their customers, while protecting their market share and bottom line. 

In this post, we’re going to discuss the challenges involved in implementing a successful multi-brand strategy, and how content management technology like Contentful can make a difference. 

Let’s dive in.

What is a multi-brand strategy and why do you need one?

Most digital marketers know how to manage their business’s brand with the technology available to them. At Contentful, we’ve got plenty of experience doing that with an array of innovative content management tools, including Contentful’s headless content management system (CMS). 

So, “going multi-brand” is just a question of doing more of that … right? More brands means more content management?

Not quite. Transitioning from the management of a single brand (and an existing digital content tech stack) to multiple brands, isn’t as simple as launching a new website or a new ecommerce store. 

Multi-brand companies need to think carefully about how their two (or three, or four, or more) brands talk to their audiences and preserve the brand loyalty and brand visibility that they've spent years building. 

How will you make their new brands' voices distinct? How will you store and publish content for those brands? How will you continue to create distinct new content experiences for them? How will you scale your approach to content management to continue to achieve the results you achieved as a single-brand entity?

That’s where your multi-brand strategy comes in.

The scaling problem

Essentially, a multi-brand strategy refers to the approach that multi-brand businesses take to scaling their digital content from one brand to multiple brands. 

Let’s use an example — but move from food to beverages. A corporate entity, EXTREMECORP, owns an energy drink brand but then decides to buy an organic tea brand, CALMCORP. Now, EXTREMECORP has become a multi-brand entity, and is faced with maintaining two distinctive brand voices in order to serve its relationship with two different customer bases. It renames itself as EXTREME-CALMCORP but also has to scale its content management solution so that it can start producing and managing two separate (and different) content workflows, even if they share the same tech stack. 

In other words, when you become multi-brand, you need to be aware of the market presence that each of your brands enjoys. You need a way to give new brands sufficient autonomy to execute their separate content strategies, while maintaining the collective efficiency and value of the people, processes, and technology behind that effort. 

Different brands, different experiences

The above is a hypothetical but there are plenty of real-world businesses that manage diverse multi-brand portfolios and have to tackle multi-brand marketing challenges.

For example, Contentful customer Danone owns Activia, Alpro, Actimel, Evian, and more, a corporate family that spans dairy, specialized nutrition, organic, and plant-based products. Similarly, BMW owns a diverse range of car brands, including the higher-end BMW and Rolls-Royce, the more mainstream MINI, and its motorcycle brand, BMW Motorrad. 

You may not be super familiar with each of the brands listed above, but it’s clear that they need to deploy different digital experiences for their audiences and various market segments. If those experiences start to degrade or dilute, it's more likely that once-loyal customers will start to brand-hop.

And individual brands don’t always define and shape their digital experiences in exactly the same ways. Some might focus on region, some on language, some on industry, and so on. That can be a problem for businesses that don’t have technology in place flexible enough to accommodate the expanded, diverse content requirements of multiple brand voices, or to react to the changing needs of new customer segments. 

Let’s explore that technology issue a little further. 

Legacy content solutions vs. multi-brand strategies

Legacy content solutions often struggle when it comes to managing digital content across multiple brands. 

We mentioned the scaling issue — the problem being that the technology behind those solutions doesn’t offer the kind of flexibility that developers and marketers need to sustain unique voices and unique experiences for the multiple individual brands that fall under their control. 

To look at the problem in more detail, legacy content management systems tightly couple their front and back ends, which tangles content presentation up in underlying code. That monolithic architecture means that marketers often need developer assistance when publishing or editing content in order to avoid formatting disruption on the website, which slows down the content workflow and makes it difficult to react to market trends and launch new marketing campaigns. 

Legacy CMSes also typically only serve websites, so if one brand in a corporate family wants to launch a mobile app, its content team will likely need to buy and run an entirely new mobile CMS to do that. In that kind of multi-platform environment, content typically isn’t reusable, and has to be copied and pasted between systems — a process that’s not only tedious and time-consuming, but error prone.

Those issues limit a business’s digital scaling capabilities and, consequently, opportunities for individual brands within a multi-brand environment to express themselves and tackle their specific content challenges. That situation makes executing a multi-brand strategy more complicated, not least because it can lead to the following key content management problems:

• Duplication: In a complex multi-brand environment, it’s likely that the same content will be duplicated across different brands, especially if you’re copying and pasting shared content between environments. Too much duplicated content makes it more difficult for a brand to establish a distinct identity.

• Inconsistent messaging: Multi-brand management can make it difficult to create and maintain distinct brand identities and voices. This can lead to inconsistent messaging, disjointed digital experiences, and reduced customer loyalty. 

• Keyword cannibalization: Multiple brands may share search engine optimization (SEO) goals, and end up targeting the same keywords — ultimately, harming each other's performance on search engine results pages (SERPs) and opening up space for other brands to capture customers' attention.

• Governance: Without centralized oversight of shared content, company leadership will lack control of brand narratives across platforms and markets, leading to diluted brand identity, and diminished effectiveness in reaching target audiences. 

So, what’s the solution to legacy CMS scaling challenges? 

Executing your multi-brand strategy with Contentful 

Scaling for multi-brand ownership requires businesses to think differently about content management. 

An existing content management solution might work for more than one brand voice for a while, but different brand teams will inevitably want, and need, to create different digital experiences — and will seek new technology to be able to do that. 

Contentful’s approach to content management delivers exactly that kind of flexibility — by decoupling frontend content management from backend technical administration, and creating an entirely composable content ecosystem populated with modular apps and services. Our headless CMS allows businesses to extend creative autonomy to individual brand content teams, while retaining centralized control of the wider content ecosystem. 

Here, headless simply means that Contentful makes no assumptions about what digital content will look like when it's published. And so, freed from backend technical concerns, brands can create their own frontend experiences, with no risk of coding complications and formatting errors. Frontend services are connected via application programming interfaces (APIs) which ensure the safe, secure transfer of data regardless of programming language. 

Headless scaling advantages for multi-brand businesses

Contentful’s headless, API-first approach is specifically useful for multi-brand scaling challenges.

With Contentful, content can be published anywhere within your digital ecosystem — so, no need for tedious copying and pasting between environments. That also means that brands can develop their own content strategies and their own governance styles, creating content once and then pushing it out to websites, apps, wearables, store displays, and any other touchpoint, seamlessly and consistently. 

In Contentful’s headless CMS, content is stored in a centralized repository, and secured with clear access permissions to ensure there’s no confusing crossover between different brands. This means that the head office can keep close control of content from one interface, partitioning or restricting access to the relevant stakeholders, while brand teams can create and publish in alignment with their own needs and preferences. 

If brands want to add a new feature to their front end, they can do so easily. Our API-first platform is designed for extensibility, and so brands can build their own frontend tech stacks, choosing from a vast ecosystem of apps and services in order to shape content experiences down to the smallest detail. 

Even better, Contentful’s native AI supercharges that headless flexibility with game-changing content automation. Using our CMS, individual brands can take generic content and localize it at the click of a button, translating text and adding alt text tags for huge volumes of content automatically. Similarly, our AI can also help brands personalize content more easily, even automating A/B tests to determine the best performing versions of content. 

Master your multi-brand strategy today

Whatever the size of your corporate family and the complexity of your digital ecosystem, Contentful helps you take control without limiting the creativity and character of individual brands — or their relationships with their customers. 

Don’t take our word for it. If you’re developing your multi-brand business model, and need to kickstart your content strategy, contact our sales team to discuss your options.

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