Five Competing Brands, One Focused Growth System
The Challenge
A large private equity-backed consumer business was running a portfolio of five acquired brands in an increasingly expensive, commoditized category. The market had gone price-driven and the brands were competing against each other without a post-acquisition go-to-market strategy. Integration had never really happened: each brand carried its own positioning, messaging, systems, vendors, and marketing priorities. Value propositions lacked differentiation, paid media messaging was not aligned to consumer intent, and the marketing model had grown too complex to operate efficiently. Underneath that sat disparate homegrown systems, data that was unavailable or unreliable, vendor relationships not tied to performance, and a marketing team organized around individual brands rather than consumer targets.
The Approach
We evaluated the portfolio, clarified what role each brand should play, and rebuilt the performance marketing system around it. That meant auditing search intent across the major category keywords to see what consumers were actually looking for and where each brand could credibly compete; building brand-specific messaging frameworks to separate them; rewriting paid search copy for three target brands against real consumer intent; and aligning website and landing page messaging so the on-site experience matched the ad promise. Alongside the demand work we reviewed media partners for cost efficiency and performance alignment, assessed how the marketing team was structured and how it worked, and recommended moving from brand-aligned teams to a consumer target-focused structure.
The Results
Growth came in 29% year over year on only 15% more ad spend. Cutting the active portfolio from five brands to three created focus and ended internal competition, and every major KPI improved — from conversion rate through customer acquisition cost. Media partner expense came down from 8.5% of gross media, and the marketing organization was restructured around consumer targets rather than legacy brand silos, producing unified objectives, clearer accountability, and a leaner operating model. The largest remaining opportunity is SEO, still gated on the CMS rollout across the portfolio.
Why It Matters
Private equity-backed platforms often acquire multiple brands before integrating their go-to-market strategy. Without clear brand roles, consistent data, aligned vendors, and a performance-oriented operating model, complexity gets expensive fast. Turning portfolio complexity into a focused growth system is what produced stronger year-over-year growth, better media efficiency, lower partner expense, and a structure that can scale.
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