As manufacturing becomes increasingly flexible and market accessibility speeds up, adopting a multi-brand strategy could be the golden ticket for business growth.

The world's most prosperous companies are multi-brands, managing a diverse portfolio of products, each with its unique brand identity. It's an intelligent move, isn't it?

In the ever-evolving business landscape, diversification and market expansion are always on a company's agenda. This is where the multi-brand and multi-site strategy steps in. It's currently a popular trend in e-commerce, enabling businesses to efficiently handle multiple brands and websites under a single umbrella.

Historically, these multi-brands have used their financial prowess to heavily invest in advertising and climb the ladder. However, the rules of the game have evolved. The tech giants have demonstrated an alternative path, potentially more effective: focusing on the experience.

But here's the catch: experience can't be purchased off the shelf; it must be cultivated. So, if multi-brand companies aim to remain competitive, they must emulate the tech giants, harnessing technology to deliver extraordinary experiences. This shift will require a substantial change in mindset and technology.

One hurdle is that multi-brands are typically decentralised. The financial resources, decision-making authority, and market entry strategies are often located away from the corporate heartland.

Understanding Multi-Brand strategy

When a corporation like Procter & Gamble owns and promotes multiple distinct brands like Tide, Pampers, and Crest, each targeting a unique market segment, it's termed as a multi-brand strategy. This approach has several advantages, including appealing to a broader customer base and catering to various demographics and price points. It boosts market share and profitability, encourages cross-selling and up-selling, and appeals to "brand switchers" who remain loyal to the company while switching between brands.

On the other hand, a multi-site strategy involves operating several websites, each tailored to a specific audience or purpose. Amazon's separate websites for different countries, each catering to the local market, are a prime example of this.

However, for companies with numerous products, making isolated technical strategy decisions can lead to a complex web of isolated architectures. This situation constrains the potential to optimize investments, discover synergies among similar brands, and stimulate healthy competition to enhance performance.

Modern consumers demand a seamless, personalized experience, regardless of their location, the channel they use, or the brand they prefer. Therefore, companies must manage the entire customer lifecycle and adopt technologies that integrate all touchpoints and data.

Opting for a unified customer experience over a separate solution for each brand is a more sustainable success strategy, offering better returns on investment. Whether a customer is returning an item in-store or browsing a website late at night, companies must foster that relationship by interacting with them and effectively managing and closing the sale.

Hence, multi-brand businesses must abandon the outdated "digital transformation" mentality and commit to becoming a fully "digital enterprise". They must select technologies that provide scalability and consistent experiences without sacrificing differentiation or innovation.

Multi-Brand and Multi-Site Strategies to increase experience

When businesses utilize multi-brand and multi-site strategies simultaneously, they unlock a world of synergistic benefits. By operating various brands and sites, they gain the flexibility to experiment with a range of marketing tactics and proposals. This could be as simple as testing a new product or pricing model on a single brand or site before rolling it out company-wide.

In the digital business landscape, experience is king. It's no longer enough for brands to engage in simple transactional interactions with their audiences, nor for a company to rely solely on cross-promotion and upselling across its multiple brands and sites. The spotlight is now on relationship-building, a strategy that can significantly boost a company's revenue and customer lifetime value.

To cultivate these deep connections and lasting loyalty, businesses need to break free from traditional silos and embrace a more flexible, agile approach to technology. This is where composable architecture comes in. It breaks down the entire platform into separate, independently customizable and replaceable elements, empowering businesses to select and integrate the best components to tailor their technology stack, and ultimately, the customer experience.

Supporting this composable approach is the MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native) architecture, which seamlessly integrates and connects various platforms and components. A composable enterprise, backed by MACH architecture, is adaptable and ready for change, with every component designed to be pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and continuously improved through agile development to meet changing business demands.

This move towards composable architectures shakes up the traditional 'one-size-fits-all' technology model. Yet it's not a new idea, with composable commerce pioneers like Commercetools leading the way for the past ten years. By 2024, Forrester’s Emily Pfeiffer predicts that at least a quarter of digital tech spending will shift away from maintaining old systems, with "smaller, targeted moves" taking over half of all replatforming initiatives.