Cross-border e-commerce brand strategy: analysis of advantages and disadvantages of multi-brand strategy

In today’s highly competitive market environment, cross-border e-commerce companies adopt a series of brand strategies to enhance market share and brand awareness. The main components of brand strategy include branding strategy, brand user strategy, brand repositioning strategy and corporate image identification system strategy. In addition, multi-brand strategy is gradually gaining recognition in cross-border e-commerce, despite its certain advantages and disadvantages.

Brand Strategy Overview

Brand strategy is a key part of corporate management and marketing, including establishing brands, trademarks, and market positioning. Key brand strategies include:

  1. Branding strategy: Cross-border e-commerce companies establish their own brands and trademarks to enhance market competitiveness, although this will increase costs;

  2. Brand user strategy: Enterprises can use their own brands, intermediary brands or a combination of both to flexibly choose sales strategies;

  3. Brand repositioning strategy: When the market environment changes, companies may need to reposition their brands to adapt to new market demands and competitive conditions. The costs and potential benefits of this strategy need to be carefully evaluated;

  4. Corporate image identification system strategy: Convey the company’s business philosophy, culture and values ​​through the overall communication system to gain unanimous recognition from customers and employees.

Advantages of multi-brand strategy

Multi-brand strategy is a behavior for cross-border e-commerce companies to operate multiple brands at the same time. The advantages of this strategy are specifically reflected in the following aspects:

  1. Market cultivation: Multiple brands can help support the rapid development and maturity of the market. Multiple brands jointly exploring the market can avoid the disadvantages of insufficient market participants.

  2. Market coverage: With market segmentation, a single brand cannot meet all consumer needs. Multi-brand strategies effectively expand market coverage and achieve diversified product lines to cope with increasingly refined market demands. .

  3. Flexibility and competitive protection: A multi-brand strategy provides companies with more flexibility, helps limit competitors’ expansion opportunities, and at the same time defends the core brand’s position in price wars through secondary brands. .

  4. Core brand protection: Multi-branding is of great significance in maintaining core brand image, which can increase overall market share and strengthen the company’s negotiating position with retailers.

Disadvantages of multi-brand strategy

Although a multi-brand strategy has many advantages, its implementation also faces some limitations:

  1. Diminishing Marginal Utility: As the number of brands increases, the market contribution of new brands may decrease, so investments between brands need to be balanced within limited resources. Multiple brands may erode each other’s market, especially when product differentiation is not obvious, competition is particularly fierce.

  2. Brand promotion costs: Multi-brand strategy requires companies to invest heavily in publicity and promotion. Long-term and huge publicity budgets are often beyond the affordability of some companies.

By combining these advantages and disadvantages, cross-border e-commerce companies need to formulate reasonable brand strategies based on their own circumstances to gain a foothold in the fiercely competitive market.