Your Shoppers Already Move Between Your Brands

Your Shoppers Already Move Between Your Brands. Here's How Parent Companies Can Grow With Them.

By Amanda Boshell, Product Marketing Manager at TrueLoyal

If you own a handful of consumer brands, there is a pretty good chance some of your best customers are already moving between them.

The question is whether you can actually see it.

So first, let's get really clear on what a parent brand is, because this is where things can get convoluted fast.

A parent brand is the company that owns a bunch of brands underneath it. The parent has the child relationship, right? All of the brands underneath it are the children. But those brands are also siblings to each other, which makes them sister brands.

Still with me?

A single brand can have a ton of different products and categories for consumers to choose from, but it is still that one brand. A deodorant brand that adds body wash and body spray is still one brand.

What we're talking about here is a parent that owns that deodorant brand, but also owns a laundry brand, an oral care brand and something you plug into the wall to catch pests.

Totally different brands. Potentially totally different shoppers. All rolling up to the same parent.

Church & Dwight is a really good way to picture this. They own Arm & Hammer, OxiClean, Batiste dry shampoo, TheraBreath mouthwash, Hero's Mighty Patch and First Response.

You could walk into one household and probably find five of those products right now, and that family may have absolutely no idea they all come from the same company.

And each individual brand is only seeing its little piece of that household.

To be clear, I am using Church & Dwight to show how a parent company is structured here, not to make any assumptions about what they're doing with their customer data.

Now, the biggest consumer goods companies have spent years and a whole lot of money trying to see across their brands. They've invested in data platforms, cloud partnerships and clean rooms, and they love talking about how many consumer records they've collected. Nestlé told investors it was working from more than 340 million first-party records. Clorox announced it had hit its goal to know 100 million consumers.

But what almost none of them talk about is what all of that data actually did for the value of a shopper, aka lifetime value, across their brands.

So here's what we're actually talking about.

You run a loyalty program on one of your brands, and you use it to learn who your shoppers are, what they need and how they live with your product. Then, behind the scenes, you start connecting what you're learning across your sister brands.

The shopper keeps their relationship with the brand they love.

The parent finally gets a better view of the whole household.

If you're running loyalty, ecommerce, or brand at a company with a handful of brands under one roof, this one's for you.

And no, you do not need some enterprise-sized data team to get started.

You just need curiosity, a clear plan for what you want to test, and the right people in your corner.

Let the brand lead and the parent learn

This one might feel a little counterintuitive if you sit at the parent level.

Individual brands feed up to the parent, but it is the brand itself that has the relationship with the consumer. They're the ones providing the product and, ideally, that product is solving something the consumer actually needed.

That's where the direct relationship lives.

A couple of the biggest names in consumer goods learned this firsthand.

Kellogg's Family Rewards ran for about a decade with roughly 33 million participants before it shut down at the end of 2022, and Kellogg's said it wanted a new approach led by its iconic brands.

Coca-Cola retired My Coke Rewards back in 2017.

Both ultimately made the call that the relationship belongs with the brand people actually love.

And I tend to agree.

But keeping the brand out front does not mean the parent has to sit back there completely in the dark.

Some platforms can now connect a shopper's profiles across sister brands without dumping everything into one massive, horribly complicated database that somebody then has to filter, slice, dice and somehow make useful.

So take the Church & Dwight example.

Maybe the parent sees that households buying Arm & Hammer are also showing up with OxiClean. Maybe there are other combinations nobody expected. Maybe one sister brand is naturally feeding another and nobody has ever stopped to look at why.

Now I have something I can learn from.

And I can start figuring out whether there are thoughtful ways to influence that behavior without messing with the individual brand relationships that got the customer there in the first place.

There is definitely a line here, though.

It cannot feel intrusive, and it absolutely cannot feel icky or big brother-y.

A shopper opts in to share their data with a brand, and your legal team should be making sure whatever you do across the parent organization is appropriately covered. But even when you can share data across brands, there should still be a very clear answer to a simple question.

Why is this good for the customer?

If you're using what you know to spam somebody to death with every other brand in your portfolio because they bought one thing, you've crossed the line.

If you're saying, hey, people who buy this tend to find this other product genuinely useful too, and here's why, now you're potentially helping.

It has to feel organic and thoughtful. It should never feel like you figured out who I am and immediately started working your way through the corporate product catalog.

Whether the parent itself ever needs to show up in that relationship is another strategic decision.

If your parent company has a great reputation, or a philosophy people naturally gravitate toward, maybe that connection actually helps.

But say you have an eco-friendly brand sitting next to one that very much isn't. Now you have to ask whether connecting those dots is even relevant to that audience, and whether it makes them feel more attached or less.

Nobody's hiding anything here.

You're deciding whether surfacing that relationship actually makes the consumer experience better.

Find the natural bridges between your sister brands

So how do you figure out which sister brands should connect?

I would start with the problem each one solves.

One brand solves something for the customer, and sometimes that creates a really natural opportunity for another brand to solve whatever comes next.

But sometimes it doesn't.

And I think that's important because once companies realize they can connect customer data across brands, there is going to be an urge somewhere in the building to connect everything to everything.

Please don't. Please practice restraint here.

A laundry brand and an oral care brand might sit under the same parent, but somebody buying detergent is not naturally thinking, "Well, I guess mouthwash is next."

There may be some audience overlap there, sure. But that does not automatically mean there is a meaningful customer journey between them.

Part of the parent's job is figuring out which relationships actually make sense and leaving the others alone.

In the Church & Dwight example, Arm & Hammer baking soda and OxiClean can very naturally live in the same laundry room.

That is worth exploring.

Batiste and Mighty Patch could very reasonably show up in the same morning routine.

Also worth exploring.

TheraBreath and First Response?

Maybe there is something there, but I am certainly not going to force one because they happen to live in the same corporate portfolio.

And this is also where your customers can teach you something you never would have figured out sitting around a conference table.

Look at Arm & Hammer.

It was baking soda, and then the brand learned about all of these other ways people were using it around their homes.

Talk about a smart brand play. That's exactly the kind of learning I am talking about.

Consumers do weird, creative, and genuinely useful things with products all the time.

You might stumble onto those things eventually.

But it is a whole lot easier when you've already created a relationship where your customer is willing to tell you.

Start with one brand and test your way forward

This is kind of a Ted Lasso moment.

Be curious.

One of the biggest things I've learned sitting on the brand side is how easy it is for brands to assume they know their consumer.

Someone validated something three years ago, it made its way into the strategy deck, and suddenly we're all treating it like a universal truth forever.

Consumers change. Their lives change. The way they use your products changes.

And sometimes what you thought you knew was never quite right in the first place.

If you're a parent company, you have this wonderful advantage where every one of your brands potentially has something to teach the others.

So learn from them.

Look at the overlap between sister-brand shoppers and ask what actually drew someone from the first brand to the second.

When I was working on Microsoft Rewards in what seems like ages ago now, we ran tests like this all the time. You find something you think might be true, you create a way to test it, and then you see if the customer agrees with you.

For a company doing $50 million to $500 million with a handful of brands, I would start with one brand.

Test the waters.

Find one sister-brand connection that makes sense, layer in a benefit or experience that introduces members to it, and watch what happens.

And I mean actually watch what happens.

Did behavior change? Did people buy the sister brand who would not have otherwise? Did they buy sooner? Did they stick around?

Now, that second question is the one people tend to skip, and it's honestly the most important one. It's really easy to look at a group of members who bought the sister brand and call it a win. But what you actually need to know is whether they bought it because of what you did, or whether they were going to buy it anyway. If everybody you targeted was going to buy the second brand anyway, congratulations, you sent them an offer. You didn't necessarily create any new value.

So the only way to know is to plan for it before you start. Go in with a hypothesis and decide how you're going to measure it. Set aside a control group that doesn't get the offer, so you can compare what your test group did against what would have happened on its own. If the hypothesis holds, run it again, learn something new and keep evolving.

And this is exactly the kind of thinking that pays off at the portfolio level. General Mills is one of the few companies that has talked publicly about looking at this across its portfolio. It runs one rewards program across its brand portfolio, and its members bought 1.5 times more General Mills brands than the average shopper on the Fetch app.

So the question I want parent companies asking is what those members did differently because you had the relationship. How many members you signed up is just the starting point.

Why it's worth it

At some point, someone in the room is going to ask why you need a loyalty program at all when you're already getting shopper data through retail media and clean rooms.

Fair question.

Retail media can tell you a lot about what somebody bought. What it usually cannot tell you is why. And the why is where a direct relationship can give you something very different because now you can actually ask.

What problem were you trying to solve? How are you using the product? What do you wish worked differently? What else are you using with it? How does this thing actually fit into your life?

That information starts filling in all the context around the transaction.

Of course there is a cost to running a program.

But if you only ever look at loyalty as a cost, and you never build the discipline to measure what the relationship creates, it is always going to look like another line item somebody eventually wants to cut.

Think about what you're already paying for elsewhere.

A program can generate UGC, ratings and reviews, direct feedback, referrals, and a much clearer picture of who your best customers actually are.

You basically have little focus groups living inside your own brand environment.

Use them.

And think about what becomes possible when something you learn through one brand can help a sister brand make a better decision too.

Who makes it happen

This is usually the part where the enterprise case studies start becoming intimidating.

Huge consumer companies have whole data, analytics, ecommerce and loyalty teams behind this stuff.

Meanwhile, a mid-market parent might have a small ecommerce or retention team with five brands pulling them in five different directions before 9:30 on Monday morning.

So what is the minimum version of that army who can get this thing to work?

Honestly, it starts with somebody willing to own it and leadership making it clear this actually matters.

And when you have that leadership buy-in, and the right person at the helm of loyalty, that person needs to come forward with a recommendation.

What are we testing? What do we think we're going to learn? How are we measuring it?

And, probably most important, what are we going to do if we're right?

Then they have to bring people along. This is the part that gets underestimated. You cannot sit inside loyalty, learn something incredibly useful and assume the rest of the business is magically going to know why they should care.

Tell people.

Show the sister brands what's in it for them. Show product what they can learn. Show ecommerce. Show finance. Show customer experience. Show your friends in IT.

There is a little bit of a political game here, a little “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

And I don't mean that negatively. The person sitting in the operator seat has to be able to walk across the business, talk to their counterparts and get people invested in what they're building.

Someone who is too passive is going to have a very hard time trying to get this done.

You need to be willing to push, ask annoying questions, show the numbers in the WBR, show them again in the QBR, and probably show them one more time in the annual business review because someone forgot what you told them six months ago.

It's possible, and you don't have to do it alone

I want you to walk away believing this is possible.

I do not want you to walk away thinking it is easy, or that you can flip something on and suddenly every sister brand starts beautifully working together while customer lifetime value goes up and everyone gets a promotion.

Wouldn't that be nice.

There is work to it. A lot, actually.

But if you can see more of the household across your sister brands, understand how those relationships naturally connect and actually use what you're learning, there is a lot there to work with.

I've sat in that operator seat, so I know one of the scary parts of all this. It's figuring out who is actually going to help you do it.

Because a loyalty program operator is basically a small business owner inside a business. You're doing strategy, operations, analytics, customer experience, stakeholder management, technology, finance, and about four other jobs nobody remembered to put on the job description. Add a whole portfolio of sister brands on top of that, and it's a lot for one person to carry alone.

That's why who you partner with matters so much. When I was evaluating platforms, I talked to a lot of them, and I needed more than software. I needed people who could help me think through the strategy and then actually get the thing done. There were not many that could bring both, and that combination is rare. It's one of the reasons I ultimately came to TrueLoyal.

So if you're sitting inside a parent company with a handful of brands and a hunch that your shoppers are already moving between them, you do not need to solve the whole portfolio tomorrow, and you don't have to figure it out by yourself either.

Pick one brand.

Find one sister-brand connection that makes sense.

Get curious about what the customer is already showing you.

Test it. Learn. And then decide where to go next.

That feels a whole lot more manageable than trying to boil the corporate ocean.

Sources

About the author

Amanda Boshell is a Product Marketing Manager at TrueLoyal. She spent twelve years as a loyalty practitioner before moving to the platform side, across agency, tech, and retail, in roles spanning program operations, strategy, and marketing. She has sat on both sides of the table, as the operator running the program and as the buyer evaluating the platforms.