By Fernando Berrocal

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A successful startup business brand is something that every professional entrepreneur dreams to accomplish for their organization. Consider a business brand that has a hierarchy of other kinds of brands and services; it might be a pretty big corporation, or just a starting business, that can benefit from developing a multi-brand strategy.

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If you are thinking about big corporations that provide services, you could be considering Amazon which is a giant of Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Client (B2C) services. It offers Prime Video, AWS, Amazon Echo, etc. If you think about products rather than services, you might be thinking of P&G, which is the owner of Pampers, Gillette, and Old Spice is another example. Even though each of these well-known businesses sells a different set of products and/or services to different people, they all share a distinct brand hierarchy in common. This kind of hierarchy consists of a parent business or corporate brand at the top, a family brand in the middle, and individual brands at the bottom of the hierarchy.

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However, you need to understand that brand hierarchy isn't just a feature of big businesses whether you're a new or prospective entrepreneur. Any type of corporation with several brands or offerings might create a distinct type of structure, and they must do so. Lack of preparation and structure may damage business strategies and perplex potential customers. You may sell your brands and products more successfully by outlining how they differ from one another and relate to one another. We'll go through the key steps to developing a successful multi-brand strategy in the following points.

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• Determine the main causes of brand misunderstanding, and remove them. You may find some overlap if you examine the many product lines included in your organization's portfolio. Forget what you already know about them and consider each business from the standpoint of the consumer by asking yourself the following question:

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Where may the identity and values of each brand confuse a potential customer? Every sort of corporation must get rid of any internal confusion between its various brands. Eliminating misunderstandings between its brands and the same products and services sold elsewhere in the market is also crucial. Where are there any brand redundancies? What's lacking that would make each brand associated with your business stand out?

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We'll discuss one example for this case, there is the parent business "Innovative Ergonomic Solutions" (IES), which quickly acquired other different trademarks. Five distinct businesses were offering ergonomic workstation solutions for IES through a variety of products and methods: 

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• HAT Contract
• Ergotech
• SiS Ergo
• CompuCaddy
• Innovative Office Products.

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However, without a distinct brand hierarchy in place, there was ambiguity about how these enterprises linked to one another or didn't relate to one another at all, both internally and in the commercial marketplace.

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The difficulty for IES was to structure the brands with a clearly defined go-to-market strategy in the context of the current explosion of expansion and acquisition of various product lines and market categories. Optimizing each brand's potential without eroding market share or alienating its dealer network is another main challenge.

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• Create a holistic strategic plan for the startup business: Every multi-brand business should be able to see its corporate hierarchy as a straightforward chart with a parent brand at the top and every subsidiary brand branching right off from it. According to their key sales channels or other market-specific traits, the subordinate businesses in this sort of organizational structure are arranged by the parent corporate body.

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The chart should almost complete itself after internal brand redundancies inside the organization have been removed. This may be a helpful tool for figuring out what connects all of the brands in a company's portfolio and where they all align in the market. Consider the following questions as you analyze the specific chart:

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• Is every product made available through the best sales channel?
• Where is there potential to rebrand particular products?
• Is there a more effective approach to set out the chart in terms of the organization's long-term strategy, which includes any potential brand acquisitions in the future?

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• Articulate new brand strategies: It's time to refine individual brand strategies now that a long-term plan is in place and a sustainable hierarchy of brands is available to build upon. What distinguishing qualities and views do each brand's customers have? What is the best way to capitalize on these favorable qualities and impressions while strengthening each brand's position? To answer these crucial issues, each brand's verbal and visual representation will need to be improved from the bottom up.

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Multiple businesses and product lines were combined to create IES's new brand, HAT Collective. Each provided special qualities and client perspectives. This new organization needs to capitalize on those favorable qualities and impressions while also presenting a fresh, refined look. A whole new method of verbal and visual presentation was needed for this.

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Clarity-building in a multi-brand business requires proactive time and effort, as well as strategic planning. The alternative is an unintended brand structure, which might end up costing a company more owing to miscommunication inside the company and with the public, lost sales, and missed opportunities. All good marketing organizations are built on a firm foundation of a clearly defined brand structure and successful brand positioning for each company inside it.

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