How to Avoid Brand Dilution in Multi-Brand Organizations

Key Takeaways

Brand dilution is bad for your portfolio and your financial outlooks. Which is why you must avoid it at all costs. In this article, we explain why brand dilution occurs and list 6 practical tips for strengthening brand identity, compliance, and consistency across your multi-brand organization.

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Brand dilution is the deterioration of a brand’s equity and image. Like watering down a good whisky, the change isn’t only noticeable, but very difficult to reverse.

This dilution can happen in a number of ways. A brand may launch an ill-fitting product, stray from their once-steadfast brand guidelines (e.g. by posting a tonally off social media post), or breach an important SOP or compliance obligation.

Though independent brands are at risk of brand dilution, the stakes are much higher for multi-brand organizations. With a portfolio of brands to balance — each with their own distinct identity, customer base, and values — the challenge of maintaining consistency multiplies.

What’s the real cost of brand dilution?

Although 55% of consumers stay loyal to brands they love even after a mistake occurs, it’s still a fine line to tread. Trust takes time to build and no time at all to break.

Repeated instances of “off-brand” behavior accumulate. And it isn’t just individual consumers you need to worry about upsetting.

Take BrewDog as a stark example of brand dilution. Once considered the top dog of craft beer in the UK, the brand has landed itself in multiple scandals over recent years. In 2021, a letter signed by over 100 former employees exposed Brewdog’s toxic company culture, revealing instances of inappropriate leadership behavior, falsified marketing stories, and non-compliant operations. This instantly rendered BrewDog’s seemingly stalwart company charter moot.

More recently, BrewDog scrapped its commitment to paying workers the real living wage, instead opting to pay the UK’s national living wage.

All of this resulted in more than just consumer dissatisfaction. Their beer has been stripped from almost 1,900 pubs within the last few years — a distribution drop of over 50%. And, as we write this article, BrewDog is contending with the closure of 38 bars and the loss of almost 500 jobs after selling to US buyers.

6 ways multi-brand organizations can strengthen individual brands

BrewDog’s story is a cautionary tale. Strong, authentic brands that stay true to their core values last. Those that break their promises and mislead consumers are bound to fall. All it takes is one poor customer experience, one employee-written letter, one damning expose.

So, when managing a multi-brand organization, never forget that every brand is important. Though you manage them centrally, you must treat them as separate entities.

With that in mind, here are 6 ways you can strengthen the brands in your portfolio.

1. Keep brand knowledge up-to-date

Every brand has its own unique brand identity, with distinct guidelines, standard operating procedures, and digital assets to support it.

To ensure marketing messages, customer interactions, and buying experiences are consistent and on-brand, these resources must be easily accessible and current.

We recommend housing them in a centralized intranet software that:

• Stores digital assets, brand messaging documents, and SOPs in dedicated applications.
• Automatically updates versioning, ensuring employees cannot access or download out-of-date content.
• Supports mobile access and enables frontline teams.
• Speeds-up information retrieval with AI-powered search and overviews.
• Provides helpful AI document assistants that can summarize information and highlight relevant passages.

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t display all of this information to every brand in your portfolio. (Brand A doesn’t need to see Brand B’s latest social media mockups, and vice versa.) This not only muddies brand identities, but can quickly lead to information overload.

With digital workplace solutions like Claromentis, you can set granular user permissions that personalize intranet experiences. This means each brand can view intranet themes, content, pages, and widgets that align with their organization — as well as any necessary portfolio-wide communications and resources.

2. Give brands ownership of their voice

Over half of UK consumers are less likely to buy from a brand if it “ignores its obligation to address a societal issue”.

In other words, the messages your brands share matter. And sometimes these messages have to be big.

A clothing retailer with a commitment to ethical manufacturing practices may release comments on global labor laws, if applicable. A travel company with LGBTQ+ friendly packages may publicly choose to end its partnership with hotel chains known to discriminate.

Messages that teeter into politics can be uncomfortable. But, while you may be tempted to dull down your brands’ voices and absorb them into your “parent” messaging and values, this may not bode well for equity or sales. Messages should stay true to the heart of the brand, always. It’s your duty to liaise with your teams and share the right words, in the right way, and on the right platforms.

3. Enforce and track policies

Your policies and SOPs are only useful if employees read, accept, and understand them. Otherwise they’re nothing more than words on a slip of paper.

To increase operational and regulatory compliance, house these documents in an intelligent policy management application that enables policy owners and compliance teams to:

• Manage the complete policy lifecycle, from setting review dates to requesting feedback.
• Distribute approved policies to employees and enforce acceptance with compulsory checkboxes.
• Track acceptance rates across each brand.
• Improve employee understanding via in-system AI chatbots that simplify language, answer relevant questions, and summarize long passages of text.

"Communicating changes or new information across a network of over 100 locations can be difficult. Claromentis offers a user-friendly solution to this challenge by allowing us to upload documents, news, and training quickly, and then display them in a fresh and visually appealing way that drives engagement."

James Peacock

Head of Brand & Communication at Winkworth Estate & Letting Agents

Read case study

4. Build and distribute brand training

Your brand identity may be distilled in your guidelines, but it lives in your employees.

To avoid brand dilution, every team member must know your values, SOPs, and regulatory obligations inside out. The best way to guarantee this is through standardized, brand-specific training that tests knowledge and certifies course completion.

A comprehensive learning management system (LMS) is a great way to deliver this at scale. With the right platform, you can:

• Create SCORM-compliant e-learning pathways for each brand, role, and compliance requirement.
• Incorporate in-person and virtual training events (particularly important for teaching employees how to use machinery, store systems, and products etc.) — with attendance tracking mechanisms.
• Test knowledge retention with engaging quizzes.
• Automatically certify users and add courses to a living training record.
• Provide additional support with assigned course tutors.
• Use SOPs, policies, and documents as e-learning materials.
• Access internal communication tools and intranet features (in the same platform) to streamline course research and support.
• Adjust content access rights and experiences for new employees with automated “LMS triggers” that update user permissions after a course has been completed.

5. Standardize brand audits

Yes, accessible documentation, tracked training, and policy acceptance mechanisms reduce the likelihood of brand dilution. But, as a safeguard, it’s important to inspect your brand locations regularly.

Standardized brand standards checklists help your auditors catch any instances of non-compliance before they escalate out of control. Each time they visit a location, they can follow the same audit criteria, reducing the likelihood of missed steps or errors. They can even submit photographic evidence to back up their claims if needed.

Once the auditor submits the digital e-form, you’ll receive proof of the audit, as well as qualitative insights into brand consistency and non-compliance.

A solution like Claromentis takes these e-forms a step further with integrated logic and workflows. When an auditor flags a problem, Claromentis will then automatically create a ticket for the relevant HQ team or individual for escalation. This ensures brand dilution is resolved in a timely manner.

NOTE: we provide a free customizable brand standards audit for franchise, multi-brand, and multi-site organizations. However, you can also harness our integrated business process automation platform, InfoCapture, to build completely original e-forms and workflows. No matter how unique your brand procedures, InfoCapture can help you simplify, streamline, and standardize them.

6. Monitor performance metrics

As the saying goes: the proof is in the pudding.

Despite your best efforts, brand dilution may still occur. This could be due to an unintentional marketing move, a change in customer priorities, or a failure to keep up with consumer expectations (for example, increasing costs significantly during a time of economic difficulty).

Bearing this in mind, it’s important to monitor each brands’ performance on an ongoing basis. This requires:

• Tracking metrics surrounding brand equity, financial performance, customer behaviors, and compliance
• Standardizing data capture via uniform checklists and automated processes.
• Centralizing data collection in one platform.
• Building brand-specific dashboards that turn data points into actionable insights, ensuring you can monitor daily compliance and identify performance trends with ease.

Claromentis: built for multi-brand organizations

Even the toughest of brands can break. For organizations juggling a portfolio of brands, the odds of this happening are significantly higher.

To prevent brand dilution, you must give your brands the autonomy over their voice, image, values, and messages — all while tightly governing the systems that uphold operational consistency and compliance.

Manually, this can be difficult to orchestrate at scale. Which is why it’s better to harness technology wherever possible.

An AI-powered digital workplace like Claromentis unifies your portfolio, simplifies brand management, and brings clarity to your daily operations. With our comprehensive solution, you can:

• Build a centralized digital workplace for everyone in your multi-brand organization, and personalize content, themes, and experiences with granular user permissions
• Store brand assets, SOPs, and policies in version controlled applications
• Prove policy acceptance with compulsory checkboxes
• Standardize daily operations and brand standards audits with no-code e-forms and automations
• Enhance compliance and brand understanding with SCORM-compliant e-learning courses and AI-powered chatbots
• Consolidate your performance metrics in brand or location-specific dashboards

Claromentis powers a diverse range of multi-brand and multi-site organizations across the globe, including companies like TravCorp. This online travel agency group harnesses our digital workplace to coordinate its brands, centralize communications, and speed-up training and onboarding. All of which help to enhance performance and strengthen brand identity.

To find out how we can empower your multi-brand organization, schedule a quick discussion call with our team.

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