By Hiot Shawl, Managing Partner and Ethne Twomey, Principal Consultant. PHD Beyond
Portfolio businesses are, on paper, a marketer’s dream – a diverse portfolio of products or brands catering to a wide audience, fostering synergy, and offering the opportunity of market dominance.
But the reality can be wildly different. A labyrinth of fragmented customer journeys, siloed operations, and competing priorities can create marketing disharmony.
The key to unlocking the true potential of portfolio businesses lies in creating connected decisions that are fuelled by automation and data-driven solutions.
This ensures a unified customer experience and minimises brand cannibalisation – a common pitfall for portfolio businesses. Making this work isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach though. It’s about fostering a culture of collaboration and leveraging data to create seamless customer experiences that transcend individual brands.
Portfolio businesses need to address seven considerations as part of finding an effective solution:
- Defining the North Star: Many marketing efforts have faltered without a unifying purpose and overarching vision that binds the brands together and resolves conflicting KPIs. Successful multi-brand businesses are the ones which establish a shared philosophy that transcends individual goals, prioritising a customer-centric approach. This vision translates into measurable objectives that focus on the health of the entire portfolio, not just individual brand performance.
Think ‘Avengers Assemble’ for marketing, but with less Lycra and more spreadsheets (hopefully!)
- Gap analysis: We are seeing an increase in engagement from portfolio businesses focused on how they understand and develop holistic customer journey mapping. Often, encompassing all brands within the portfolio means looking for identification of key touchpoints, or potential hand-offs between the brands, as well as opportunities to create a seamless, multi-brand experience.
By mapping the entire customer journey across all brands within a portfolio, marketers can identify potential gaps, inconsistencies, and incremental opportunities. This allows for the curation of a holistic, seamless experience where customers feel recognised and valued regardless of which brand they interact with, and regardless of touchpoint. This data-driven approach enables brands to optimise ROI as they can clearly map opportunities for cross-sell, upsell and retention, increasing lifetime value at a total level.
- Building customer understanding: Orchestrating connected decisions relies heavily on robust data and tech foundations. It’s like building a house – if the groundwork is shaky, the whole thing crumbles. The quality of brands’ customer insights and their journey across brands is directly tied to the quality of the data that’s collected. We advise our clients to focus on gathering high-quality first-party data (1PD) across all brands within their portfolio. This data can encompass website behaviour, app usage, customer surveys, loyalty program information, and purchase history. The quality measures must reflect its usefulness, reliability, compliance, and cost to achieve. The key challenge for brands lies in integrating 1PD from various sources. The right Customer Data Platform (CDP) can be a powerful tool for unifying and managing this information across portfolio brands. It allows you to create a single, holistic view of your customer, providing a more accurate foundation for journey design. The right consent framework and clear privacy guidance can then ensure consented data can be utilised compliantly across the brand portfolio.
- Automation to enhance efficiency: Manual data collection is time-consuming and prone to errors. Marketing automation platforms can automate key activities like data collection, campaign management, and reporting. This frees up marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives and creative work. By leveraging automation and a unified customer view, marketers can create a powerful decision-making engine. Advanced analytics and machine learning models can analyse this data, predicting audience behaviour and content performance. This ‘crystal ball’ allows for proactive decision-making and faster optimisation, with real-time analytics providing the ability to turn insights into action with unprecedented speed. Of course,in the current landscape, establishing clear data governance policies to ensure data quality, security, and compliance with privacy regulations is key.
- Breaking down silos: In the world of portfolio marketing, breaking down departmental silos is essential for driving harmonious performance at a total business level, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. Brand teams should collaborate, not compete. Blend, not battle.
Joint planning sessions eliminate duplication of effort and ensure consistency and levelling up across the board. Breaking down those department walls, encouraging brand teams to (metaphorically) high-five across the aisle, share knowledge and collaborate on plans stops everyone from stepping on each other’s toes (and budgets). Data becomes the central nervous system for these teams, informing holistic and strategic decision-making. Implementing a centralised data governance framework allows for the creation of a unified customer view. This unlocks a deeper understanding of customer behaviour across all the portfolio brands, creating a data-driven decision-making culture which is geared towards the over-arching visions.
- Unified Customer Journeys: Successful multi-brand businesses leverage the collective power of their portfolio to develop consolidated media strategies which are rooted in a deep understanding of their consumer behaviours, need states and journeys. This helps marketers move beyond brand-specific media plans and develop consolidated strategies that leverage the collective power of their portfolios too. This ensures relevant and effective journeys for target audiences whilst avoiding media cannibalisation. Every marketing pound spent delivers a maximised return. Data-driven attribution models become the roadmap for this, meticulously tracking customer journeys across brands and touchpoints.
- MarTech Alignment: A unified technology stack across all brands acts as the foundation for streamlined workflows, faster campaign execution, and minimised complexities. This allows marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives, as automation takes care of the ‘plumbing’. Standardised performance measurement makes business wide benchmarking more meaningful and learnings quickly scalable across brands. A misalignment of technologies creates unnecessary troubleshooting energy for both client teams and their agencies. Tracking KPIs aligned with a shared vision ensures that all efforts contribute to overall portfolio success, and nobody gets left feeling like they’re just playing the triangle in the back of the orchestra (a crucial role, but not exactly the lead singer).
Success for portfolio businesses lies not just in managing multiple brands, but in creating a seamless and frictionless experience for customers.
By connecting decisions across strategy, data, KPIs, marketing, and operations, marketers can transform their portfolio brands into acustomer-centric group of superheroes.
But even the Avengers needed Nick Fury to bring them together and set the vision, so don’t be afraid to ask for some help.
