How Brand Ideas help businesses find their acquisition sanity.
Let’s start with a question: How do you grow?
Not the ‘drink more water and meditate’ kind of growth. We mean the stakeholder-pleasing, margin-widening, sales-boosting kind. The kind that gets the Board off your back, gets investors clapping and maybe even a corridor whoop (OK, we might be pushing it now).
The problem is, the more a business grows, the more complex it gets. And when complexity outpaces clarity, things get messy. Commercial momentum stalls, integration fails, and value gets diluted.
If that growth depends on M&A, as it so often does in the private equity backed worlds of ‘Let’s acquire more companies and hope they all get along’ – what looked like value on a spreadsheet quickly becomes fragmented…
The average business today straddles:
- Different verticals
- Dispersed geographies
- Multiple customer segments
- Complex portfolios of overlapping products
See the problem? Suddenly, those quarterly earnings calls get harder to communicate. Predictable growth wobbles and optimism turns to doubt. Sales teams sweat through decks they don’t understand, customers nod politely but can’t quite remember what you do. And as for your internal teams – they’re either completely lost – or browsing LinkedIn jobs, unsure which direction the company is taking.
And amid the madness, one small but mighty question gets even harder to answer: What does this company actually stand for?
This isn’t business-as-usual.
This is what happens when your business grows faster than your story.
Introducing: The emotional heartbeat and strategic spine
Before your eyes glaze over, and you mutter, “Oh god, not another ‘purpose’ slide,” let’s be clear: This isn’t just about purpose, it isn’t about vision, it isn’t about a tagline. We’re not talking logos or fonts or whether your CEO should start a TikTok. We’re talking about the thing that doesn’t simply solve acquisition confusion, but brings clarity to value articulation, to uniting your teams, to selling more simply.
It’s what we call the Brand Idea (capital B, capital I, please). It’s the unshakable narrative that holds your whole business together: your beating heartbeat and your strengthening spine.
We believe a strong Brand Idea:
- Unites departments, regions, product lines and people
- Arms sales with something they can sell
- Gives marketing a clear narrative they can use to power comms
- Offers customers a reason to care, beyond “we have six slightly different solutions and here’s our confusing matrix of features”
- Instills your business with the confidence and clarity it needs to scale through acquisition (if that’s part of your strategic growth plan)
Using a Brand Idea to guide your business choices
Here’s the clever bit.
A Brand Idea isn’t just a slogan or a positioning tool. It’s a powerful decision-making tool. It’s what connects the dots between your growth strategy and day-to-day execution.
Bringing in an acquisition?
Ask: Can we align this business with our Brand Idea?
Thinking of selling off a legacy asset?
Ask: Does it fit our Brand Idea anymore?
If the answer’s ‘no’, then it’s up to you: reposition – or let go?
The Brand Idea becomes the litmus test, the filter, for what fits and what needs to change. Whether you’re scaling or streamlining, you can return to your Brand Idea time and time again. It’s a way of helping to create clarity and sanity to the process.
You see a Brand Idea is not fluff or part of a basic marketing tick-box exercise. It comes with some pretty definitive commercial benefits:
Engaging your people: When teams understand the story, they believe in the mission, have a shared sense of purpose — and are more likely to stick around
This is exactly what we helped one of our clients, EXA. Infrastructure isn’t especially sexy or cool, but it is the backbone of civilization. So when this fibre optic powerhouse with big growth plans came to us, we built their brand around a single, powerful Brand Idea: Where Growth Happens.
As EXA expanded — notably acquiring Aqua Comms, and Global Communications net, and developed partnerships with Cambridge Management Consulting and Big Data Exchange — the Brand Idea held their acquisition story together.
The result? A business aligned from the inside out, with commercial clarity. A business that people could believe in, partner with, buy from — and invest in. A business that had confidence in their strategic plan. And built success in the marketplace.
And that’s the magic of a Brand Idea. Whether you’re acquiring, integrating or preparing for sale, it’s the strategic glue that holds everything together, inside and out.
Why don’t you find out what it could do for you?