3 Tips for Pivoting Your Brand After an Acquisition

Rebranding has never been an easy feat, but in an era when many marketers are managing global markets, multichannel campaigns, and sophisticated marketing technology, it’s particularly challenging.

There are many reasons to transform or refresh a brand, but when the rebrand is triggered by a merger or acquisition, the situation can be especially high-pressure. At a time when the company is going through significant change and uncertainty, marketing is being tasked with both re-envisioning the brand and delivering a reassuring and consistent customer experience. And because acquisitions happen quickly and generate a lot of attention, marketers need to be ready to transform the brand and roll it out swiftly in order to be ready when the news goes live.

We helped one of our clients, a company in the fintech space, overcome the brand challenges of an acquisition, transform the brand, and roll it out across the website, social media, and Marketo—all within three months. You can read the case study here, but here are three of the lessons we learned during this whirlwind experience.

Choose speed over perfection

Mergers and acquisitions happen fast and make a big splash. Marketers seldom get much advanced warning, which means that you’ll need to prioritize speed over perfection to get in front of the news and be ready to present a unified front (visually and conceptually).

A sleek rebrand will help to reinforce the message that the change is a good thing that will elevates rather than disrupt the experience, but it needs to roll out sooner rather than later. Work fast and focus on the most important elements of the visual identity and key messages:

• A compelling story about the acquisition that highlights the positive impact on customers

• An updated logo and visual vocabulary that mesh with those of the parent company

• An updated tagline, boilerplate, and key messages that align with those of the parent company

Most importantly, prioritize “on time and good enough” over “too late and perfect.” You have one chance to get in front of the news and position the acquisition as orderly, planned, and beneficial. Remember that the brand is a living, evolving entity that can be refined over time. Focus on deploying a minimum viable brand on schedule and then iterate as you go.

Find the shared values

Transforming the brand is about more than tweaking the visuals. If the acquired company’s brand colors match the parent brand, but the value proposition clashes, the new brand is likely to ring hollow with your customers.

To resonate with your audience, tap into the emotional dimensions of the brand and find common ground at the level of brand values. For example, pre-acquisition, our client had built a brand identity around the concept of “connection”—bringing their industry together through their integrated technology platform as well as through networking events. Fortunately, connection was also an important element in the acquiring company’s brand, and this provided a bridge between the brands that enabled the companies to find common ground and tell a consistent yet familiar story to their respective customers.

Finding common ground is not only a good way to smooth the transition, it also improves longer-term performance. Research published in HBR revealed that companies that took a “fusion” approach to brand transformation—integrating elements from each brand—delivered higher market returns over three years than those that adopted a “business as usual” approach, where both brands remained unchanged, and those that choose to “assimilate” by discarding one brand completely in favor of the other.

Plan for the technical complexities

This may be the single most important thing to remember when pivoting a brand in the digital age: the rebrand itself represents a fraction of the work involved. Yes, adjusting and re-aligning the visuals and values that define the new brand is hard work. But it’s nothing compared to the effort and preparation that go into rolling that brand out across multiple channels and technologies.

Think of it as the 80-20 rule. Pivoting the brand takes 20 percent of the effort. Deploying it without a hitch across every channel and customer touchpoint takes up the other 80 percent.

And it requires significant technical skill to do it right. To ensure that our client’s refreshed and re-aligned brand rendered perfectly across multiple email clients, multiple browsers, and multiple devices, our martech experts worked feverishly behind the scenes, testing, tweaking, and retesting. When the news of the acquisition was finally made public, our client was able to flip the switch and ensure that the new brand went live simultaneously across all customer touchpoints.

After all, what good is a well-conceived, beautifully executed brand if it reaches the customer as a broken image or an error message (or if it doesn’t reach them at all)?

On time, on message, everywhere

When you’re a loyal customer, change is scary. Nothing will undermine the trust and brand equity that a company has built up faster than a post-acquisition experience that is poorly thought out or poorly executed. Having a consistent brand experience ready to launch when the news hits the wire will go a long way towards signaling that the acquisition has the customers’ best interests at heart.

Focus on getting the timing right, highlighting the values that united the two companies, and ensuring that the updated brand elements are delivered seamlessly across every channel.