I was scrolling the other day and read that a medical device business got carved out of its parent company this month.
Two private equity firms, a new name, a full identity, a public launch.
Roughly four months from the first working session to the announcement. Ninety-three business days. Pretty fast for a major branding and identity project.
Then I got to the part where they ran it through all 1,800 employees.
1,800.
Which sounded to me like a terrible idea.
I posted something back in March about a dinner that started as sushi and ended as mac and cheese. It was about how brands end up beige.
The argument was that it’s never one big decision that waters things down, it’s a dozen small reasonable ones.
Somebody’s nervous about the color. Somebody else had a bad experience with something bold at a previous job and brings it up in every meeting until you stop bringing it up. Legal softens the one sentence anybody would have remembered.
So 1,800 people should be the most beige thing imaginable.
But it wasn’t beige at all. And it took me a minute to work out why it worked.
It’s moving day
Moving houses is the wost.
When you move, you don’t gather everyone in the driveway and take a vote on where the couch goes. That’s how the couch is still in the driveway at 9pm.
You decide where it goes, and then you hand people things to carry. Everybody’s involved either way. What makes the other version a committee is that nobody decided first.
Ask 1,800 people to decide what a company should stand for and you’ll get mush, guaranteed. But tell 1,800 people what it stands for, and then actually need them to carry it into 1,800 different conversations with customers, and you’ve got a different animal entirely.
Same people in the room. It’s just that somebody already answered the question before they walked in.
The people who have to say it out loud
And in a merger you don’t get to skip that second part.
These people just watched their employer’s name come off the building. Nobody outside knows the new one.
Every customer relationship in the company runs through somebody who now has to explain, unprompted, who they work for. If they can’t say it, what you have is a hollow logo and a deadline.
We’ve been in that room a few times. Here’s what marketing teams tend to run into when a merger lands on their desk.
Four months
The speed is the other thing, and I don’t think it’s a brag.
Four months is short enough that it makes the decision for you. You can’t run eleven rounds of stakeholder feedback in that window. Somebody has to call it early, and somebody has to be allowed to. Usually that’s a strong client.
Here it was the clock, though I’d guess it was a mixture of both. Which is maybe the whole lesson, if there is one. Don’t involve everybody, and don’t involve nobody.
That’s me arguing with myself a little, because in March I said don’t ask everyone and I still think that’s right. I just had half of it. You can hand all 1,800 people something to carry. They don’t get to vote on what it is.
The hardest part
I’ve been chewing on this all year. We built a voice tool that talks you through your brand architecture, and the engineering took about a day. This isn’t a plug for the tool (although you should check it out), but I can’t help but think about how tech will allow the branding process at scale then ever before.
We’re working on a project now where we literally walked around a space and interviewed people by striking up conversations. Which is totally appropriate for this consumer brand.
But in B2B, which is our core focus, seeing some one include 1800 people in a brand exercise is half terrifying, and half inspiring. And I think new tools and tech will let everyone feel they had a voice, outside of a traditional simple survey.
Not to decide, but to include. Which when building a brand is everything, especially during a merger/acquisition.
As my own business evolves and ages, making decisions becomes the hardest part. I need and value opinions, but two things I’ve learned. You can never make everyone happy. And slow bandaid removal is never a good idea.
Decide fast. Then hand people something to carry.
