The Post‑M&A Digital Mess: How to Standardise Without Slowing Growth

If you’ve grown through acquisition, you’ll recognise the pattern…

You inherit new brands, new teams, new agencies and suddenly you’re responsible for a digital estate that feels impossible to steer. Multiple websites. Multiple tech stacks. Multiple ways of tracking performance. Multiple versions of “the truth”.

And the frustrating part? Everyone is busy. Everyone is doing “work”. But progress feels slow, expensive, and oddly fragile.

This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s an ecosystem problem.

At R3, we work with multi-brand, multi-territory organisations where growth is held back by fragmentation, especially after mergers & acquisitions (M&A). The good news: you don’t need to rip everything out and start again. You need a practical way to standardise what matters, protect what’s working, and build an integration backbone that lets you scale.

The real issue: M&A creates more “systems of truth”

Post‑M&A, most organisations don’t just end up with more websites, they end up with more sources of truth:

• Product data lives in different places (ERP, spreadsheets, PIMs, supplier feeds)
• Customer data is split across CRMs, email platforms, and local databases
• Orders and stock behave differently by brand or territory
• Tracking and attribution are inconsistent, so performance debates never end

When you don’t agree what the truth is, every initiative becomes slower:

• Launches take longer because integrations are brittle
• Reporting becomes a negotiation
• Teams build workarounds that create more complexity
• Growth experiments stall because the foundations aren’t stable

The goal isn’t “one platform to rule them all”. The goal is coherence: clear sources of truth, standardised data contracts, and an ecosystem that can evolve without breaking.

A pragmatic diagnostic: the 5 layers of your digital ecosystem

When we’re brought into messy estates, we start by mapping five layers. It’s a simple model, but it helps stakeholders align quickly.

1. Experience layer: websites, apps, content, UX patterns
2. Commerce layer: catalogue, pricing, promotions, checkout, subscriptions
3. Data layer: product, customer, order, consent, analytics schema
4. Operations layer: ERP, fulfilment, finance, customer service
5. Activation layer: CRM, marketing automation, experimentation, measurement

Most post‑M&A pain shows up when these layers don’t agree or when each brand has implemented them differently.

When we map these layers, we're looking for three things:

Where do you have competing sources of truth?
When the same data exists in multiple systems with different versions, every integration becomes a negotiation and teams stop trusting the numbers.

Where do the layers fail to connect properly?
Brittle handoffs between layers mean launches slow down, things break in production, and workarounds build up, including technical debt and ongoing maintenance costs..

Where has each brand built the same capability differently?
Different implementations of the same layer mean you can't share work, compare performance, or move people between brands.

This diagnostic tells you where fragmentation is costing you speed and where standardisation will unlock the most value.

What to standardise first (without triggering a multi-year programme)

Here’s the practical sequence we recommend. It’s designed to reduce risk and create momentum.

1) Agree your sources of truth (before you touch the website)

Decide explicitly where the truth lives for:

• Product (ideally PIM; sometimes ERP)
• Customer (CRM/CDP; sometimes CRM + warehouse)
• Orders/stock (commerce platform + ERP/OMS)

Why this comes first: without it, every integration is a one-off. And one-offs don’t scale.

2) Map the integration backbone

Identify which integrations are mission-critical (and therefore must be robust):

• Pricing and availability
• Stock and fulfilment
• Orders, returns, refunds
• Customer identity and consent
• Product enrichment and localisation

Then choose an integration approach that fits your reality:

• Point-to-point (fast, but can become brittle)
• Middleware/iPaaS (more scalable, clearer governance)
• Custom services (when off-the-shelf patterns don’t fit)

This is where many agencies struggle because it’s not just “build a site”. It’s architecture, data contracts, and operational reliability.

3) Standardise what should be global; localise what must be local

In multi-territory groups, speed comes from clarity.

Typically, you standardise globally:

• Design system and core templates
• Analytics and measurement schema
• Data contracts and integration patterns
• Core performance and accessibility standards

And you localise:

• Language and compliance
• Merchandising rules
• Regional content and campaigns

This gives you central control without blocking local growth.

4) Rationalise platforms, but don’t chase the “single platform” fantasy

Consolidate where it removes complexity. Keep separation where it protects speed or revenue.

The best outcome is rarely “everything on one CMS” or “everything on one commerce platform”. It’s a coherent ecosystem where change is safe.

5) Build a 90-day plan: stabilise foundations, then unlock growth

A good 90-day plan typically includes:

Stabilise:

• Tracking consistency (so performance is measurable)
• Performance fixes (so conversion isn’t leaking)
• Data quality improvements (so teams trust reporting)
• Hardening critical integrations

Unlock growth:

• CRO roadmap
• Lifecycle and retention improvements
• Paid efficiency through better feeds, landing pages, and measurement
• Experimentation cadence that doesn’t break the stack

If this sounds familiar, here’s a simple next step

If you’re dealing with post‑M&A fragmentation and you want a pragmatic plan (not a multi-year replatform pitch), let’s talk.

Book a discovery call and we’ll:

• Map your current ecosystem at a high level
• Identify the biggest sources of friction and revenue leakage
• Recommend a practical sequence of work (what to fix first, and why)