The Channel Mix Problem: Why Most Brands Are Optimizing in Silos
Published: January 8, 2026 | Case Studies & Guides, Retail & Commerce, Technology & Tools
You’ve got a team managing Amazon. Another handling retail media on Walmart or Loblaw. Someone running your DTC site. Maybe a wholesale division working with independent retailers. On paper, you’re everywhere your customers shop.
But here’s the question most brands don’t ask often enough: are these channels actually working together, or are they just… coexisting?
The difference matters more than you might think. Channel presence is table stakes. Channel strategy—where each platform plays a defined role in a coordinated system—is what separates brands that scale efficiently from those that plateau despite doing everything ‘right’ on an individual channel basis.
Most brands we work with have the first. Far fewer have the second. And the gap between them is costing more than most realize.
Key Takeaways
- Channel silos develop naturally as brands grow—nobody designs them intentionally, but organizational structures reinforce them
- Silo optimization leads to cannibalization, wasted ad spend, inconsistent customer experiences, and an inability to identify true growth drivers
- ‘Omnichannel’ often becomes a buzzword that papers over siloed operations rather than solving them
- A connected channel strategy defines distinct roles for each platform—acquisition, retention, margin—rather than treating them as interchangeable
- Breaking down silos starts with shared visibility and cross-channel KPIs, not reorganizing your entire team
How Do Brands End Up Operating in Silos?
Nobody sets out to build silos. They emerge naturally as brands grow and add channels over time.
It usually starts with DTC—your website, your customer relationships, your data. Then Amazon becomes too big to ignore, so you bring on someone who understands that ecosystem. Retail partnerships expand, and suddenly you need people who can navigate retailer portals, co-op programs, and retail media networks. Each channel has its own complexity, its own rules, its own expertise requirements.
The logical response is specialization. You hire or assign people to focus on specific channels. You give them budgets. You measure them on channel-specific KPIs. This makes sense—Amazon expertise is genuinely different from DTC expertise, and you want people who know their platforms deeply.
But specialization has a side effect. Each team starts optimizing for their own metrics. The Amazon team wants to grow Amazon sales. The DTC team wants to grow DTC sales. The retail media team wants to improve ROAS on their campaigns. Everyone is doing their job well—and yet the overall business isn’t moving as efficiently as it should.
Organizational structures reinforce this pattern:
- Separate P&Ls for different channels create competing incentives
- Channel-specific bonus structures reward local optimization over global outcomes
- Different reporting tools and data sources make cross-channel visibility difficult
- Meetings and planning cycles happen within channels rather than across them
The silos aren’t anyone’s fault. They’re a predictable outcome of how most brands scale. But predictable doesn’t mean inevitable—and it certainly doesn’t mean optimal.
What Does Silo Optimization Actually Cost Your Business?
When channels operate independently, the costs show up in ways that are easy to miss if you’re only looking at channel-level performance.
Cannibalization between channels
Your Amazon team runs a promotion. Your DTC team doesn’t know about it. Customers who would have bought at full margin on your website find the deal on Amazon instead. Both channels can report ‘success’—Amazon sees a sales spike, DTC maintains steady traffic—while your overall margin erodes. Without cross-channel visibility, you can’t even see this happening.
Wasted ad spend from bidding against yourself
This is more common than brands realize. Your retail media team is bidding on branded keywords through a retailer’s search ads. Your Amazon team is bidding on the same terms. Your DTC team is running Google Shopping campaigns. You’re competing against yourself across multiple platforms, driving up costs while reaching the same customers who were already looking for you.
Inconsistent customer experiences
Pricing varies unexpectedly between channels. Product information differs—different titles, different images, different descriptions. Promotions don’t align. From the customer’s perspective, it feels like dealing with different companies. This erodes brand trust and makes purchase decisions more confusing than they need to be.
Inability to identify true growth drivers
When each channel reports independently, you can’t see the full picture. That retail media campaign might be introducing customers who later convert on Amazon. Your DTC content might be educating shoppers who buy in-store. Channel-level metrics make everything look like it’s working—or not working—in isolation, when the reality is far more interconnected.
Duplicated effort and inefficiency
Each team creates their own product content, their own creative assets, their own promotional calendars. Work gets repeated across channels instead of leveraged. Resources that could be spent on growth get absorbed by redundant operations.
Why ‘Omnichannel’ Usually Doesn’t Solve the Problem
At this point, someone usually brings up ‘omnichannel.’ It’s become the default answer to channel fragmentation—the idea that brands should deliver a seamless, integrated experience across all touchpoints.
The concept is sound. The execution rarely matches the ambition.
Most omnichannel initiatives focus on customer-facing consistency: unified branding, synchronized messaging, connected loyalty programs. These are worthwhile goals. But they often become a veneer applied over the same siloed operations underneath. The customer sees a more consistent brand, but internally, the same fragmented teams are still optimizing against each other.
True channel integration requires more than consistent messaging. It requires:
- Shared goals that transcend individual channel performance
- Visibility into how channels influence each other
- Coordinated planning that accounts for cross-channel effects
- Incentive structures that reward overall business outcomes, not just channel metrics
Without these elements, omnichannel becomes another buzzword—something that sounds good in strategy decks but doesn’t change how decisions actually get made.
What Does a Connected Channel Strategy Actually Look Like?
A connected channel strategy doesn’t mean centralizing everything under one team or treating all channels identically. It means being intentional about how channels work together, with each platform playing a defined role in a coordinated system.
Clear channel roles
Different channels serve different purposes. Maybe Amazon is your volume driver and customer acquisition engine. Your DTC site builds deeper relationships and captures higher margins. Retail partnerships provide credibility and physical presence. Retail media networks let you reach shoppers at the point of decision. When each channel has a defined role, you can optimize appropriately rather than pushing every channel to maximize the same metrics.
Unified customer view
This doesn’t require a massive CDP investment—though that can help. At minimum, it means understanding how customers move between channels and what triggers those movements. Are your DTC visitors also buying on Amazon? Do retail media campaigns drive traffic to your website? You can’t manage cross-channel dynamics you can’t see.
Coordinated promotional calendar
Promotions should be planned across channels, not just within them. This doesn’t mean running identical promotions everywhere—different channels may warrant different offers. But it means understanding how a promotion on one platform affects others and making deliberate choices about timing and positioning.
Shared data foundation
Product information, pricing, inventory, creative assets—these should flow from consistent sources rather than being recreated for each channel. This reduces errors, ensures consistency, and frees up channel teams to focus on optimization rather than data management.
Cross-channel accountability
Someone needs to own overall performance, not just channel performance. This might be a dedicated role, a cross-functional team, or a regular forum where channel leaders come together to review the complete picture. Without this, channel optimization will always win over business optimization.
How Do You Start Breaking Down Channel Silos?
Transforming a siloed organization into a connected one doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not about reorganizing your entire team or investing in new technology platforms. It starts with visibility and evolves from there.
- Create cross-channel visibility
Before you can coordinate, you need to see. Establish a regular reporting cadence that brings channel performance together in one view. This doesn’t require perfect data integration—even a monthly review that puts Amazon, DTC, and retail media side by side creates conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
- Add shared KPIs alongside channel-specific ones
Don’t eliminate channel metrics—they still matter for tactical optimization. But layer in metrics that reflect overall business health: total revenue across channels, blended customer acquisition cost, overall margin contribution. When teams are measured on both, they start considering cross-channel effects.
- Run pilot projects that require collaboration
Pick a product launch, a seasonal campaign, or a specific customer segment, and run it as a coordinated cross-channel initiative. Use it as a learning exercise: what works better when channels collaborate? What friction points emerge? Pilots create proof points that make broader change easier to justify.
- Align promotional calendars
Start with visibility into what each channel has planned, then move toward coordination. Even knowing that Amazon has a deal running while DTC is at full price—and making a conscious choice about that—is better than having it happen by accident.
- Bring in outside perspective
Sometimes silos persist because everyone inside the organization has adapted to them. An external partner can see patterns that internal teams miss, facilitate conversations that don’t happen naturally, and bring experience from working across channels with other brands.
From Channel Presence to Channel Strategy
Having presence across multiple ecommerce channels is no longer a competitive advantage—it’s baseline. The brands that pull ahead are the ones that treat their channel mix as an integrated system rather than a collection of independent operations.
This doesn’t require a massive transformation. It starts with seeing the full picture, asking different questions, and making intentional choices about how channels work together. The silos took time to develop. Breaking them down is a process, not an event.
If your teams are optimizing hard but your overall growth isn’t matching the effort, channel silos may be the hidden constraint. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t doing more in any single channel—it’s connecting the channels you already have.
We help brands move from channel presence to channel strategy. If that’s a conversation worth having, we’re here for it.
