If you want to increase your profit, you can either sell more or spend less. It oversimplifies business strategy, but it helps to remember that you can make money by reducing costs, not just by increasing sales.
If you run a multi-brand business, costs and savings compound when each brand multiplies the overhead and operational inefficiencies. It’s death (debt?) by a thousand papercuts. There is real savings opportunity in optimizing technology across your brands. It is why it’s cheaper to use central air conditioning than to have a window unit in every room.
Let’s look through the couch cushions of your IT budget and find some savings.
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Reducing the Invisible Costs
The vendor licenses are a no-brainer. You already know that separate platforms for each brand cost more when you have to write those annual checks. Let’s look at the invisible costs.
Multiple platforms require experts for each one. If you own Fords and Chevys critical to your business, you’ll want mechanics specializing in each. IT is no different. Sure, there could be some overlap. But instead of sharing a pool of resources, it’s common to have dedicated teams for each platform.
This duplication extends beyond maintenance and operations. Any new features or enhancements have to be built multiple times for each platform. And if you release a new feature that drives sales, you miss opportunities while you build that capability on your other platforms.
Once things are running, it’s challenging to operate each platform with one team. Each platform has specialized site operators, and sharing operators across platforms takes longer when you need to onboard new ones.
These are real cost drivers for your business, but they don’t show up as a line item in your budget. By consolidating to a single multi-brand platform, you optimize maintenance, enhancements, and operations.
Consolidate Your Data
Customer acquisition costs money. A benefit of multi-brand platforms is acquiring the customers you already have on your other brands. Usually, customer data is siloed in platforms. This siloed data limits how you can market to your customers, or you pay an infrastructure tax to synchronize the data.
As your business evolves and you can act on customer behavior by tracking key metrics like conversations and lifetime value, are all your platforms set up to track the same? If not, your data is unreliable, or you have paid the infrastructure costs, again, to make it reliable.
The more fragmented and isolated your customer’s data is, the harder it is to use it effectively. Having a single multi-brand platform sets you up to track and act on behaviors, making it easier to provide your customers with the products they want and introduce them to new ones – maybe from your other brands. It’s not just efficient; it’s economical.
Focus on Experiences & Differentiators
No one walks into an open house and asks to see the plumbing. What excites people about buying a house isn’t the mechanicals, but the visual experience (i.e., subway tile backsplash) and the features (i.e., soft-close cabinets and drawers). Your website is no different.
“Oh, look! Their middleware iPaaS is open concept!”
Running multi-brand sites across multiple platforms forces you to spend more money on plumbing and less on experiences. And experiences are your differentiators. Spending money aggregating and transforming data, or operating in platformed silos, doesn’t move your business forward. It is keeping you stuck.
Running multiple brands on a single platform doesn’t homogenize the brands. There are still ways you can “yes, and…” key differences between experiences without building cumbersome customizations. Realistically, you aren’t concerned with how the brand’s technical infrastructure is perceived by customers; it’s the experience that matters.
With one platform, an enhancement to one experience is an enhancement to all experiences. A feature that raised conversion for one brand can be deployed across other brands quickly. Feature rollout impacts your revenue, not your costs.
Multiple Brands, One Platform
Multiple brands on one platform deliver real cost savings and measurable ROI. These savings aren’t always as visible as license costs or platform fees. They show up in the inefficiencies and infrastructure costs that sprawl from managing stores across different technologies. Optimization and cost savings are the less glamorous sibling of “new features, more revenue,” but they’re just as important to your business’s health. Consolidating technology is an easy win.