Mary Say, Brand Potential
When a brand is taken over by new owners there’s inevitably a greater focus on the fastest and most efficient path to growth to achieve a return on investment and set up the next sale cycle. Inevitably, this will mean changes to the way the management team approach their growth planning and strategy under (usually) more stringent timing and budget constraints.
If the new owner is a Private Equity or other grow-and-sell vehicle, the rapid results culture change can be quite a shock to the incumbent team – progress is measured in months not years, and the strategy and execution process needs to produce results quickly and effectively. The culture change can seriously damage internal management self-belief, leading to a high churn rate as the investor burns through a series of senior team members who wilt under the pressure.
At Brand Potential we call brands in such situations Accelerator Brands: brands that face a change of pace, overt growth agendas, new management goals or need a quantum shift in their approach to marketing. The Accelerator Brand approach is rooted in our M&A due diligence work where time is of the essence – six to eight weeks to evaluate a brand’s potential and develop a robust and quantified strategy to achieve the growth target.
The ability to quantify where and how growth can be found is a key part of this process and is based around Accelerator insight, strategy and innovation practices that combine rigour, creativity and speed. Aside from the data and strategic roadmap outputs, the Accelerator Brand approach also generates that most elusive of intangible assets; confidence – investor confidence to do the deal, management confidence to follow and execute the growth strategy, and the confidence to achieve targets within the time constraints to exit.
In the current economic climate, this confidence can often be more crucial than the plan itself. Creating enterprise value is something management teams are not often tasked with – but is something that entrepreneurs do naturally as they have an innate conviction that their mission has a value to the market and thus shareholders. To stretch an analogy, it’s very difficult to accelerate with one foot on the brake, and a lack of confidence will have that left foot hovering over the pedal from day one, reducing the chance of achieving true potential.
Sometimes a brand’s potential is easy to see – a sharper future-focused innovation pipeline, a more consumer-centric repositioning, stretching the footprint into a new category and finding new competitors to challenge, new consumers to convert and new markets suitable for your competitive strengths.
Other times, the potential requires some serious digging to unearth, particularly with brands that have struggled to adjust to market, category and consumer shifts. With such brands the internal competencies become a crucial factor in the capability of achieving the brand’s growth potential.
But matching the businesses core skills and the brand’s potential to convert new consumers and to reach them with confidence and conviction is often down to elements beyond the control of management, such as choosing marketing agencies that can work at pace and with a commercial focus, and consultancies and specialists that don’t spend scarce cash resource contemplating their navels. In short, it’s a team effort and one of the key secrets of achieving Accelerator Brand status is spreading both the load and sustaining the confidence.
In essence, accelerated growth is achievable by most brands – the question of how is mostly reliant on technical expertise, but the true measure of a brand’s potential is the confidence and conviction with which it approaches the task in hand, based on a robust and rigorous strategic plan.