How to integrate brands after an acquisition.

Far too often, brand integration efforts start with naming and identity.

After months, and sometimes years of planning and negotiation, the detailed strategic thinking that went into a deal is many times pushed aside for a process that resembles business decoration.

The real brand issue is defining what the combined business can and should be, before deciding how it is expressed.

After an acquisition, leadership is usually pushed into a set number of potential options:

• Keep the existing brand

• Merge the brands

• Create something new

• Develop a hybrid approach

Customers, employees and investors expect a clear answer. And the going-forward business demands one.

But often in this process a fundamental question goes unaddressed: What is this business now, and what can / should it be as it evolves?

Not what each company was independently. Not how they were positioned before. What the combined entity is meant to be as it grows.

Without that understanding, integration becomes a series of reasonable decisions made in isolation. Naming is resolved. Messaging is updated. Identity is adjusted. But the logic that should connect those decisions is never established.

That’s why many integrations feel incomplete even after significant investment. The business has changed, but the definition of what it is has not been fully resolved.

Effective integration follows a different sequence. First, define the role of the combined business:

• What does it exist to do now?

• What is the forward-looking objective?

• How do the parts relate to each other?

• What capabilities are central versus supporting?

• Where are the boundaries?

From there, brand structure begins to take shape with purpose. Decisions around naming, architecture and identity are no longer subjective. They are determined by what the business is (and will become) and how it is intended to operate.

This is the difference between managing an integration and directing one.

Most organizations approach integration as a branding exercise. In practice, it is a direction exercise that informs brand re/development.

That’s where Brand Direction becomes necessary.

Brand Direction defines what something is meant to be and translates that definition into the structures, positioning and systems that guide how it functions internally and externally.

In an acquisition context, that means establishing a clear, governing definition of the combined business before decisions are made about how it is presented.

Without that layer, brand integration remains a surface exercise. One that will inevitably need to be addressed with more depth sometime in the future.

And when it is readdressed, rest assured that the challenges, complexity

and price tag will have increased substantially.

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About Cohesion | The Direction Company

Cohesion is a brand & business consultancy. Since 1999, our firm has helped companies transform brand into a strategic business driver: to define and position businesses, brands and initiatives into direction and frameworks that shape how those businesses operate in practice and create value, over time. To learn more visit cohesioncompany.com, or contact Brian Creath, president, at bcreath@cohesioncompany.com.