Here’s How Multi-Brand Retail Helps Grow Your Online Business

If you own an online business and you want to grow it, then you can apply all kinds of techniques. One of them is following a multi-brand approach, in which you can come up with different labels and brands under one roof.

Since the approach is quite effective, it is already followed by hundreds of companies out there. Therefore, in this post, I will let you know about the concept of multi-brand retail and how you can also implement it.

Multi-brand Strategy: Basics & Types

In simple terms, in multi-brand retail, a company branches out its entity into individual brands. While the parent brand of various storefronts or entities is the same, they can function separately. This helps us target our customers better and manage various brands easily. You can follow either of the following approaches while setting a multiple brand strategy:

Branded House

This is the most common approach in which we retain the name of the parent brand and come up with sub-brands accordingly. For instance, Google (Alphabet) is the parent brand while its sub-brands are Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Books, and so on.

House of Brands

It is the opposite of the first approach. In this, every brand can have its unique identity and might not be directly related to other sub-brands of the parent company. For example, P&G (the parent company) has numerous brands like Tide, Olay, Gillette, Pampers, etc.

Hybrid

This follows a mix of both models in which the parent brand can extend its support to a sub-brand, or it can be a standalone identity as well. The Coca-Cola Company follows a similar approach in its retail branding strategy.

Benefits of Having a Multi-brand Retail Strategy

As you can see, there can be so many ways to follow a multi-brand strategy in your company. Though, if you are not sure whether a multi-brand retail strategy is right for you, then consider its following benefits:

Product Diversification

Having a diverse range of products is probably one of the biggest advantages of following a multiple brand approach. Let’s say your company is growing and you want to have more products in your portfolio.

Needless to say, too many products and categories can end up confusing your audience. Instead, you can take diverse routes and set up dedicated brands. It is something the Unilever brand did in the past and succeeded as well.

Competitive Advantage

Too many times when a company becomes too big, it can be tough to manage its emerging products. Therefore, to overcome this challenge, it is recommended to follow different marketing paths. In this way, you can reach out to the specific audience of your products and easily beat your competitors.

Better Marketing Opportunities

Let’s consider the example of P&G, which has both Tide and Olay as sub-brands. Since the overall marketing strategy and target audience for both brands would be different, it is better to treat them individually. Following the same approach, you can also create better marketing opportunities by categorizing your products into different brands.

Budget Alignment

Furthermore, by coming up with different brands for your company, you can also manage them easily. You can simply align operational and marketing budgets for each brand. In this way, you can easily calculate the net profit or loss margin for brands separately.

Tips & Tricks to Implement the Multi-brand Strategy

Great! Now that you know the major benefits of the multi-brand retail strategy, let’s uncover some smart tips and tricks to implement it.

Tip 1: Come up with a Brand Strategy

Firstly, you need to come up with an overall strategy for your brand and the placement of its sub-brands. I have also listed different ways to come up with a multi-retail brand above.

You can let your sub-brands be the extension of the main company or can have them as standalone entities too. If you want, you can also follow a hybrid retail strategy. All of this will depend on the kind of sub-brands you want to run and their target audience.

Tip 2: Market Your Brands Thoughtfully

After coming up with different brand entities, you can place them into separate segments. For this, you can do some market research and try to identify the key demographic for your brand. Detailed market research will help you not only identify your target audience, but you can do competitive analysis.

In this way, you can learn from your competitors, know the pain points of their customers, and try to solve them with your marketing strategy.

Tip 3: Handpick Suitable Platforms to Host Your Products

As you would identify your target audience, you can also figure out the right way to sell your products. The most obvious choice would be selling your products on your eCommerce platform. The good thing about this is that you get autonomous control. The bad thing – you might have to put a lot of effort into marketing.

Besides that, you can also try to list your products on popular eCommerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy. There is also an option to sell your products directly on social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook Marketplace.

Tip 4: Map out Shipping & Order Workflow

Great! Once you have handpicked a preferred platform to sell your brands, you can easily map out its order workflow. Make sure you take care of things like shipping and order fulfillment in advance for a smooth transition.

At first, you can simply come up with the overall customer journey and the order workflow process like this. Afterward, you can alter the journey based on customized products and the brand that you are serving to get better results.

Tip 5: Do Regular Assessments

Most importantly, you should regularly assess the overall performance of your brand based on numerous parameters. I strongly recommend getting marketing statistics every month and quarter to evaluate the ROI of your efforts.

Apart from that, you should also keep a track of user feedback to identify your best-selling products (and the products that are not working so well).

Common Challenges in the Multi-brand Strategy (and how to Overcome Them)

Even though the multiple brand strategy can have tons of benefits, you can encounter some challenges while implementing it. Here are some of these obstacles related to multi-brand retail with their prospective solutions.

Issue 1: Lack of Brand Identity

The most common issue that companies face with the multi-brand retail strategy is a lack of a unique identity. Even when your sub-brand is an extension of the parent brand, it should have a unique placement in the market. To resolve this problem, you must perform extensive market research before releasing your brand. Also, you should come up with dedicated style guides and messaging for each brand.

Issue 2: Unclear Market Vision

Another issue that marketers face with multiple branding is having an unclear market vision. Remember, your goal is not to achieve everything at once with your sub-brands.

To clear this, you should first identify the pain points of your customers. Gradually, you should map your marketing strategy to resolve these pain points and must maintain a clear vision.

Issue 3: Inventory & Quality Issues

Lastly, you might also encounter issues while maintaining the inventory of your stocks and the quality of your products. That’s why it is recommended to perform stringent quality checks on your products and manage dedicated inventory.

The simplest way to resolve this is by hiring inventory and quality managers. You can also come up with a dropshipping store in which all these issues will be tackled by the supplier instead.

Explore DSers to Gear up Your Dropshipping Store

For all dropshipping store owners, DSers is one of the best tools out there. It is owned by AliExpress and offers end-to-end features to manage your online store in one place.

• DSers will help you find just the right product for your online store from a carefully curated list of hundreds of suppliers and products.
• You can also directly find the best-rated supplier for any product of your choice via its Supplier Optimizer feature.
• The best part is that DSers is available for free (with advanced premium options) and can be integrated with Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
• You can utilize your time via its advanced features like the automatic updates of order statuses or the syncing of tracking numbers.
• DSers offers tons of other features like bundle products, variant mapping, stock management, BOGO, and more.

It’s Your Turn Now!

As you can see, the multi-brand retail strategy can certainly help you expand your business into new verticals. To further help you explore the concept, I have come up with numerous benefits of the strategy and how you can implement it.

Besides that, I have also listed some of its common challenges and how you can overcome them like a pro. Furthermore, if you are an online store owner, then you can also explore DSers, which is the official AliExpress dropshipping tool.