How Brand Positioning Helps With Smooth M&A Integration And Long-Term Success

By Jaclyn Hesse

Numbers drive mergers and acquisitions. Whether or not it’s {dollars}, employees dimension or market attain, numbers inform the story. However for an M&A transaction to turn out to be an enduring success, everybody concerned wants to have the ability to observe the story.

Corporations primarily give attention to the monetary and operational facets of integration. Whereas that’s comprehensible and anticipated, a well-executed model positioning train will be the distinction between a easy transition and a cultural conflict. When a number of corporations turn out to be one, challenges prolong past combining steadiness sheets and product traces, integrating codebases, and aligning tech stacks. It’s about harmonizing numerous identities, cultures and visions.

Model positioning isn’t simply logos and taglines. It’s establishing an organization’s North Star — a guideline that orients everybody from the C-suite to the most recent rent. In M&A conditions, it turns into a strong software for integration, strategic alignment and development.

Bear in mind, it’s one firm now

In our work with personal fairness corporations and their portfolio corporations, we routinely encounter the identical situation. Corporations that should work collectively stay siloed, and this disconnect turns into institutionalized throughout varied enterprise features.

The consequence? Portfolio corporations that must be working collectively find yourself competing, cannibalizing one another’s enterprise, and finally have a damaging affect on income.

A personal fairness agency I as soon as labored with acquired three complementary tech corporations within the logistics house. On paper, these acquisitions had been meant to create a powerhouse that might supply end-to-end provide chain options. Months after the offers closed, the three corporations had been nonetheless working as separate entities.

They’d totally different gross sales groups pitching overlapping providers with inconsistent pricing methods. Potential synergies had been being left on the desk, and the mixed entity was underperforming. There was no North Star to observe; the corporate was aimless.

Develop from widespread floor

What does a North Star seem like? IMO Health gives instance. A longtime chief in medical terminology standardization, the corporate had lately acquired a healthcare AI agency to increase its capabilities. This acquisition, coupled with IMO’s personal evolution, meant it wanted a model positioning that might unify the expanded focus past being the “medical dictionary of the digital age.”

We helped craft a brand new positioning: Information to Resolve. This straightforward phrase encapsulated their expanded mission of not simply defining medical language however leveraging their mixed data and AI capabilities to boost decision-making throughout the healthcare ecosystem.

The brand new positioning grew to become a rallying cry for your entire group. It guided product integration, influenced advertising and marketing methods, and even formed hiring selections. Staff from totally different departments discovered a typical language to explain their work and its affect.

In one other case, we labored with a world expertise firm that had lately acquired a number of smaller, specialised corporations. The problem was to create a unified model that revered all corporations’ strengths whereas positioning the mixed entity for future development. We developed a positioning that emphasised how their mixed experience may drive innovation and effectivity throughout varied industries.

Inside and exterior readability

Model positioning works so effectively in M&A conditions for a number of causes. For one, it forces management to articulate a unified imaginative and prescient for the mixed entity. By involving staff from a number of organizations within the course of, it could additionally foster a way of possession and shared identification.

A robust model positioning communicates the mixed firm’s strategic rationale to clients, buyers and the business as a complete. Good model positioning additionally gives a story basis on which to construct all advertising and marketing efforts. As soon as established, it turns into simpler to make selections about which merchandise, providers and processes to maintain, modify or discard.

Because the North Star for formulating mission and imaginative and prescient statements, model positioning ensures alignment between strategic route and model picture. It additionally reinforces and emphasizes company values, shapes firm tradition and stakeholder perceptions, and drives enterprise selections from product growth to partnerships, and even future M&A.

To a contemporary begin and continued success

It’s essential to start the model positioning course of as quickly as discussions regarding a doable merger or acquisition begin to intensify. Should you wait till the deal is imminent, that’s floor you’ll by no means be capable to make up.

Guarantee representatives from all corporations are concerned within the course of. This isn’t — or shouldn’t be — about one firm imposing its model on the opposite. Determine the strengths of every and search for methods to mix them into one thing higher than the sum of their components.

And don’t be afraid to create one thing new. A merger is a chance — in some circumstances, the one alternative — for reinvention, so take benefit. As soon as the brand new model positioning is established, talk it clearly and persistently to all stakeholders.

This isn’t only a advertising and marketing train — model positioning is a part of the repertoire for seamless integration and future development. Set up a North Star, and let it information your organization to success.

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Jaclyn Hesse is co-founder of Taillight, a full-service branding company that works with shoppers from technique by way of activation.

Illustration: Dom Guzman