In a multi-brand environment, the mistake is trying to standardize everything at once. The better move is to standardize the small set of definitions, handoffs, and tracking rules that make cross-brand reporting trustworthy before enforcing visual or tooling consistency.
The first goal is not beauty. It is comparability. Leadership needs to know that one booked customer means the same thing across brands and that channel names are not hiding multiple definitions.
That is why standardization should start where trust is created: shared definitions, event naming, UTM conventions, source logic, and the handoff from marketing into booking and revenue.
The best first wave is usually small but high-leverage: core funnel definitions, channel naming, campaign taxonomy, lead-source fields, and the booked-revenue handoff.
Those are the pieces that let a cross-brand scorecard mean something and make later attribution and budget work much easier.
The things that can usually wait are more cosmetic ones: perfectly aligned dashboard layouts, nonessential taxonomy edge cases, or forcing every brand onto an identical workflow before the trust layer is stable.
Standardize what changes decisions first. Everything else can follow.