Umbrella Branding: Should You Consolidate Your Brands?

Companies operate under multiple brands for various reasons — acquisitions, changes in ownership, business mergers or diversification into new markets. We've found ourselves in a similar situation. Our brands (B1.lt and Site.pro) were targeted at completely different market segments:

Two of our audiences almost never intersected. Our website builder clients weren't even aware that we had an accounting program, and vice-versa.

However, it didn't stop us from merging. Both the website builder and the accounting software ultimately serve business needs. With time passing, we lean more into integrating our services into one another and creating a Site.pro ecosystem that has everything in one place.

Now, both services operate under the same umbrella name. Time to explain the thought process behind it as well as the pros and cons of merging brands.

Two Strategies: House Of Brands And Umbrella Branding

There are two main strategies for managing different products as a company. Either you keep them completely unrelated to each other (using different marketing, tone of voice and messaging), or you keep them together, openly united by the same brand.

The first strategy is commonly known as a house of brands. In large markets, companies often launch many small brands to gain visibility in search engines and push out competitors. Alibaba is a good example of this approach with Taobao, AliExpress, etc.

The second strategy is referred to as umbrella branding, or a "branded house" — one parent brand with smaller branches that share its name. The strategy of using a single brand for all purposes is relatively uncommon. Virgin, for example, operates under one unified brand across many different verticals and market segments. Other examples include software companies such as Odoo and Zoho.

Pros And Cons Of Managing A House Of Brands

The strategy of managing multiple brands has its advantages; otherwise, it wouldn't be commonly used. Aside from giant consumer goods corporations, many hosting companies adopt it. We initially started by keeping our accounting software and website builder distinctly different.

One of the reasons for that—and also one of the pros—is that products appeal to different audiences and markets. We aimed the accounting program at accountants and Lithuanian business owners, while the website builder was a global multinational project from the start.

Other types of products realize more advantages. For example, when a company owns multiple competing brands, customers migrate from one to another, but all of the sales go to the parent company anyway. It matters much less when one of the brands loses its power, as customers continue to choose the same company.

However, there are disadvantages that are typical for startups and small companies. The main one is that taking care of more than one brand is resource-heavy and expensive. It's double the budget on marketing, ads, design, websites and maintenance for not much gain. Having multiple brands only truly works when you have a lot of them and have the budget needed to satisfy them.

Another issue is building trust with the audience. When you have 40 small brands, they're perceived individually, while a single strong brand can help build a reputation.

A single-brand strategy can strengthen recognition and give a powerful boost to sales. A strong brand can help push new products forward, something that usually doesn't happen when a company is split across multiple brands. This strategy can make the existing customer base more lenient toward trying the new product from the company whose products they had already been accustomed to.

Why We Merged Our Brands

During expansion, companies that rely on local domains often run into problems tied to domain names. For example, the Artea bank expanded into several countries with .LT, .EE and .LV country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) but faced limitations tied to its domain-based branding.

When scaling internationally, it's common to discover that the desired domain extension is already taken—a critical issue for online businesses.

We experienced this ourselves. We owned B1.lt and B1.lv and even considered B1.ae, but acquiring B1.com turned out to be extremely expensive because the name was already taken and would have to be bought from another company. Something such as b.one could cost around $100,000 per year just for maintenance, and purchasing it outright would also be costly.

Meanwhile, Site.pro was already a developed, internationally recognised brand with a central, universal domain. This allowed us to avoid having to buy dozens of local domains, and we didn't face restrictions when entering new markets because we weren't tied to any ccTLD.

Entering a new market usually starts with an online advertising campaign, which makes clean SEO especially important. Leading IT brands typically avoid local domains altogether, as a domain not tied to a specific country is easier to promote globally.

In the short term, using Site.pro branding for an accounting program might seem strange. In the long term, however, it saves time and resources and helps build trust with the audience. Efforts go into developing a single brand instead of being spread across many.

Customers And Rebranding

When it comes to rebranding, there is always fear associated with how the customers will respond to it. Even in cases when the service doesn't go through any major changes (or even becomes better in some ways), practical experience shows that people will almost always be unhappy and uncomfortable with it. Customers get attached to brands as much as to products, if not more.

In the end, it's the product that makes customers stay. The initial reaction fades as time goes on, and people get used to the new logos—no matter how antagonistic they had been to them at the beginning.

Final Word Of Advice

Businesses that build multiple brands often don't have the capacity to develop a single strong one, which becomes a problem in the long term. For growing companies, it's important to build a recognisable brand to stand out and find a stable footing. From our experience, I recommend starting it as soon as possible.

Original publication: 2025-12-29 Umbrella Branding: Should You Consolidate Your Brands?