How HubSpot Business Units Actually Work for a Multi-Brand Company

A business unit in HubSpot is a brand container. One portal holds two or three brands, each with its own logo, colours, domain and subscription preferences, while the CRM underneath stays one CRM.

That last part is the bit to understand before you buy anything.

What you need before you can turn it on

Business Units are a paid add-on sitting on top of Marketing Hub Enterprise or CMS Hub Enterprise. So if you are on Professional today, the question to answer is whether the Enterprise upgrade is worth it. Get both quoted together and compare the total to running separate portals.

What it keeps separate

• Logo and colour palette per brand
• The domain a brand publishes its pages and emails on
• Subscription types and preferences, so brand A's newsletter subscribers are not in brand B's offers list
• Assets assigned to a unit: emails, forms, landing pages and contact properties
• Reporting, per brand or across all of them

You switch between units in the top navigation.

What it does not

The contact record. Two brands can hold the same person and the underlying record is shared. So is most of your data model: properties, lifecycle stages, deal pipelines and workflows are portal level unless you deliberately build a set per brand.

The failure that follows is specific. A customer on both lists gets brand A's campaign with brand B in the footer, because the email was built in the wrong unit. Or they unsubscribe from one brand and assume both. Neither is a bug. Both are what happens when the branding is separated and the data is not.

The setup, in order

1. Create the business unit in your settings.
2. Connect the domain that brand publishes on, if it has one.
3. Set its logo, colours and email footer, including the legal entity that authorises its marketing.
4. Assign existing emails, forms and landing pages to the right unit, before you send anything.
5. Create each brand's subscription types, then check what your existing contacts are actually subscribed to. This is where you find out how much of your list has had the wrong brand.

Two Australian rules come with a shared contact database

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, APP 5 covers notification of the collection of personal information and APP 6 covers use or disclosure. If someone gives their details to brand A and brand B's team can see that record, brand A's collection notice and privacy policy have to say so. Most multi-brand privacy policies were written for one brand and never revisited.

Under the Spam Act 2003, every commercial message has to identify the business that authorised it, by correct legal name, or name and ABN, and carry an unsubscribe that does not require extra personal information, a login or an account. If your brands are separate legal entities, each unit's footer needs the right one. ACMA's guidance on avoiding sending spam is worth reading first.

And consent given to brand A is consent for brand A. ACMA's position on inferred consent turns on a provable ongoing relationship with marketing directly related to it, and the burden of proof sits with the sender.

Is it worth it

Two or three brands with different customers, separate domains and separate lists: yes, and separate portals would cost you the shared reporting. One brand with two product lines: probably not, and well named properties, lists and templates will do that job without an Enterprise upgrade.

So mark which brands genuinely need their own sending domain and subscription preferences, then price it from there. HubSpot's documentation on managing brands with business units covers the mechanics, and keeping multi-line text formatting consistent covers the fiddly email part. Units against portals is where our RevOps and HubSpot work usually starts, so tell us how many brands you are running.