Brand architecture in business mergers
Brand architecture or structure becomes important when you have business acquisitions, mergers, or just different business units. Over the past few years, broadcast communications and tech company Kordia has been busily enriching its service offering by acquiring other top-class tech businesses, to answer the needs of their customers.
The next challenge was how to bring these businesses into the Kordia family and develop a future-proof brand strategy and a brilliant story that will enable Kordia to continue growing and servicing its customers well for the next 5-10 years.
Well first, you need to find out what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.
It starts with the hard questions
Steve Ballantyne, director of Brand IQ says that after being in the business for over 30 years, he still finds the most profound insights come out of research and he places a huge emphasis on it.
“We do the research ourselves. I don’t believe in engaging external research companies because often they miss the nuances in conversation, they miss what isn’t being said or the intention behind the dialogue,” he says.
So we began by having bold conversations with 20 staff across every one of Kordia’s business units, as well as with 18 of their customers. We asked direct questions, then probed further to get a deeper sense of the culture, what they thought each brand’s unique selling point is, and how the brand structure should be developed.
The structure needed to allow them to launch new sub-brands easily, to accommodate future growth.
A brand story with a rich past
Part of doing the brand strategy was working with them on brand architecture and developing a brand story. After analysing the research we realised the key strategy for the story was linking their past to their future – connecting 50 years of innovation in broadcast communications to a platform for future technology products and services.
The research also highlighted that the journey to that destination was about the human component. To get to that future, Kordia’s vision had to be all about their people.
After writing the brand story and radio ads, we concepted and wrote a script for a corporate video. Kordia’s marketing team worked with Grant McDonald of The Creative Department to bring our script to life in a video that connects Kordia’s rich history in broadcasting with the ability to provide world-class tech products and services well into the future – a future vision that is “all about you”.
