Merging Brand Cultures

Mark Di SommaJune 8, 20154 min

Branding Strategy Insider readers know, we regularly answer questions from marketing oriented leaders and professionals everywhere. Today we hear from Tom, a CEO in San Francisco, California who has this question about merging brand cultures…

We’re a B2B software company and, following a series of acquisitions, we’re now bringing brands and people into our business who until recently we would have considered competitors. How do we shift gears and make them feel welcome? And how do we make decisions about which brands to keep and which ones to discard?

Thanks for your question Tom. This is an issue that is very much top of mind for all brands that are merging or acquiring companies that were once rivals, particularly those that are doing so quickly. Clearly your company bought or invested in each of the rivals you chose for specific reasons. Perhaps, you wanted to expand your footprint. Perhaps they had specific IP that you wanted to acquire. Perhaps they specialize in a particular aspect of the market.

Understanding the value they bring to your new group is vital. It enables you to explain to the current team why each competitor has been acquired and what their addition will mean for the business as a whole. In particular, if it’s done well, it will help the current team to feel strengthened and ensure the incoming team(s) feel welcomed. What can be very useful, particularly at management level, is to talk through the strengths and weaknesses you each had of each other when you were rivals, and how combining forces can help you fill those gaps.

The other critical merger needs to happen across your people factors. In these situations, simply asking one culture to drop everything they have stood for and to start working in a new way will quickly lead to siloing and passive-aggressive resistance. It’s important that you work together to forge a new ambition based on your newly combined strength. Perhaps now, for example, you are the market leader. Or perhaps you are in a position to be a significant challenger. Such developments will enable you to re-scope what you aim for, where and how quickly. Next, look to forge a new cultural framework, based on that revised ambition, that merges the very best of your values and behaviors. That way, everyone in the organization must make some changes but the changes are based, at least in part, on ideas that feel familiar and on behaviors that they already know. This will help you think that through: 8 Ways To Win With Brand Culture Programs.

As you look to acquire new businesses into the future, you should also look seriously at whether these are a strong ‘cultural fit’.

In terms of deciding your brand portfolio and the architecture within which it sits, I suggest that, again, you call on your revised ambition as the benchmark against which you measure the effectiveness of all the brands in the incorporated portfolio.

Let’s start with some quick wins: Which brands are redundant? And which brands are fading? They are the first ones that can be discarded, sold or merged. Use the efficiency gains, I suggest, to help fund and resource the new core portfolio.

Which brands have the greatest equity in the marketplace (and is that equity consistent with the new goals)? Where you have powerful brands that were once rivals, how can you skew the positioning/emphasis of one/several to widen your appeal or fend off powerful initiatives from rivals?

Which brands contribute to the achievement of the audacious idea? These are the brands that will need consistent investment and strong internal resourcing. And how can you combine the knowledge and experience of the various brand teams to get the best combination of diverse thinking and critical market understanding into your individual brand strategies?

It’s also critical that you have a strong go-to-market communications strategy for your revised portfolio that explains, in terms that address the key interests and concerns of consumers, why you have come together, the key issues that you are committed to addressing and why you are now more capable of doing so, which consumer challenges you will be focusing on as a result (and which brands you will be using to do that), which brands you will be dropping and how those transitions will work for buyers.

Tom – lots to do at a time when you already feel under pressure. The key thing to strive for is clarity. The clearer you can be about the big decisions, the more straight-forward the noisy, day-to-day issues will become. Don’t expect it to be easy. But if you approach it properly, with discipline and in an open minded way, acquiring new brands and new people and working with them to the best advantage of your expanding business can be empowering, positive and, most importantly of all, successful.

Do you have a question related to branding? Just Ask The Blake Project

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