I’ve seen the same story play out time and again. Ahead of a company merger, marketing and communications teams work around the clock to merge two brands and prepare them for launch on day one. Then, two years later, the combined brand underwent a rebrand.
But why?
The answer is simple. No one knows what life is like on the other side of the door until they walk through it. And yet, time and time again, teams come up with brand strategy before the businesses have had any experience working together — they don’t honestly know who brings what and where the advantages lie yet. You can anticipate your synergies and how merging as one entity builds success in existing markets or might open the door to new markets. Still, it would help if you worked together before you could understand it well enough to brand it. There’s much work to do first.
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two part series from David Martin. Read part one here.
Step 1: Manage audience expectations
When companies merge, employees and customers wonder, “How will this impact me? Will I lose my job? Will the products I know and love be taken away?”
There’s almost always significant trepidation, so your first job must be to offer your stakeholders peace of mind. And the only way to do this is by following the first rule: Always do not harm. We must understand what they want and what’s important to them and then use this understanding to guide our collective behavior once the companies come together.
No one knows what life is like on the other side of the door until they walk through it.
Initially, this requires making sure that decisions that might contribute to insecurities and fears aren’t made and executed. Remember, your goal is to reassure your target audiences that they won’t lose anything important to them and that you’re not making any changes until they’ve had a chance to provide input and insights on where opportunities might lie. You can further communicate this commitment by giving them an active voice via customer, investor, and employee advisory boards.
This process can last throughout most of that initial year, as it’s only once your target audiences feel reassured that you can start to have forward-looking conversations. Often, customers are clients of both firms, which means they’re perfectly poised to tell you where synergies lie, as well as where they would use one company and where they would use the other. Think of it as a Venn diagram, which helps you understand where the points of intersection and divergence exist.
When two businesses come together, marketplace investigation is essential in understanding where and how to create distinction. Customers and employees can share valuable insights into how each company benefits by strengthening its market position or leveraging opportunities in adjacent areas. This insight informs business strategy, showing us the capabilities we need to emphasize and the roadmap that delivers an advantage in the eyes of your target audience. Then, and only then, can you move into brand strategy.
Step 2: Crafting the promise to integrate brands, not replace them
It deserves mentioning once more: The most successful brands engage their targets through a compelling promise of value. Given what we now know about the importance of business strategy, how do we ensure the merged brand fulfills the needs of that strategy and does so in a way that people can see? Even when determining the name, you must select something that conveys the potential of the whole.
And even then, don’t let go of the parts until your audiences have told you they’re comfortable letting them go. Wait until you have data that shows the equity in the new brand is equal to the equity in the current one and that both companies have been imbued with the value and advantage of the other.
Step 3: Fulfill the promise through an integrated culture and customer experience
Most business leaders will tell you that creating a brand promise only amounts to about 25% of the value. They will also tell you the proof is in the pudding — if you don’t deliver on your promise through a compelling experience, then what you’ve done is a waste of money. This is why building a fulfillment plan that enables the merged entity to deliver that compelling experience, starting with culture, is critical.
The work required to build and shape the culture of the newly merged entity is essential. It means finding out how to ensure employees feel like they’re in a purposeful environment — that they have the autonomy to do their work and that they see opportunities for career development and growth that were not available before the merger. Pivotal to this is helping people understand how they’re delivering value to their colleagues and how their frontline colleagues are delivering value to the customers. Moreover, clarifying the attitudes and behaviors best suited to provide this value in the customer relationship is important.
This affair starts from the inside by building the culture and then moves outward toward the customer via relationship marketing. Through customer advisory boards, the voice of the customer gives insight into the decisions they make about you and the outcomes you hope to achieve based on their relationship with you. You can then map the experience, sand down the pain points, and leverage your advantages. Highlight the hallmarks that distinguish the merged company and ensure you’ve delivered them with the same impact expected from each business pre-merger.
This third wave of work is experiential. While it starts with managing company culture, you must apply this to delivering value to the customer in a way that makes them say that your promise undersells how good you are. You’re better than the brand you’ve created, which allows you to evolve.
Because that’s just what a merger is — a process of continuous evolution.
Remember, the brand is organic. You keep shaping yourselves and shaping the brand at the same time. The experience is similarly organic. You keep evolving and evolving it, which makes for a long-term relationship — a strategic partnership. By understanding and managing perceptions and expectations, you bring people along so you don’t get ahead of yourself.
Know that you don’t have to make it perfect from day one. Apple taught us that. Think of each iteration of your brand as v2.0, then v3.0, and so on, with each new iteration improving. You must keep talking, involving, and evolving — as you would in any other relationship. When companies come together, the whole point is to grow and develop together such that there should never be an endpoint to your mutual success.
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two part series from David Martin. Read part one here.