Do you need a rebrand after an acquisition?

When British Gas bought PH Jones in 2011, it took the social housing business and left the utility services business with the family. That line had been drawn and named two years earlier, in the workshop that came before a rebrand I worked on.

So if you've bought another business and you're asking whether you need a rebrand, the answer is not yet. The logo is the last decision. Decide first what the business now is: which parts belong together, which don't, and who each one sells to.

A new name can't settle what the business is

You buy a business, and six months later the signs are wrong. Your vans say one thing and theirs say another. Your website doesn't mention half of what you now do, and customers of the business you bought still ring the old number and ask for the old people. Somebody says it's time for a rebrand, and it sounds like the obvious next step.

Most of the advice you'll find frames it as a choice about names. Fold the new business into yours. Keep its name and put yours underneath. Or run the two side by side and say nothing. Designers call that brand architecture, and it's a real decision.

It's the second decision, though. Every one of those options assumes you already know what the business is now. Usually nobody's said it out loud, and a designer can't say it for you. They can only draw whatever answer you give them.

Start with what you now sell, and to whom

When you bought that business you bought customers, people, skills, and quite often a different kind of buyer. Some of it sits naturally with what you already do. Some of it doesn't, and wouldn't even if you painted it the same colour.

So before anyone opens a design file, answer three commercial questions.

• Which parts of the group are really one business, sold to one kind of buyer for one kind of reason?
• What's left over that happens to share an owner but would run perfectly well on its own?
• For each part, who buys, and what are they buying?

The answers decide how many names you need, which one goes on the front, and what each of them has to say. Get those right and the design brief nearly writes itself. Skip them and the designer has to guess, and the guess ends up on every van and invoice you've got. The same answers are the test for marketing spend too, starting with whether a discounted advertising deal is worth it.

What happened when the logo came last

PH Jones started in Malpas, in Cheshire, as a central heating business. In April 2008 it bought Coolfactor, an air conditioning, electrical, and data cabling installer in Kent. By 2009 it was a group doing heating work on social housing contracts as well as air conditioning and cabling, and the name on the vans still said heating.

Before I worked with them, I'd seen those vans around Chester and taken them for a small local firm. I was wrong. When the business sold, around 850 people went with it.

The brief my own marketing agency was given was a new group logo and three sub-brands. Before any design started, we ran a workshop with the directors. Its agenda listed eight things to settle, and how the brand might look was the eighth.

The first seven were about the business itself. Its values, its customers, and the services it actually provided. A definition of what it was. Then a vision for the group, a mission for each business area, and a value proposition.

What came out of it was a definition of the business, split into three named streams across two companies. Home services covered homeowners, social housing maintenance and refurbishment, and home emergency work. Utility services was metering. Facilities management took in installation, servicing, data cabling, refurbishment, and fire and security, and it had its own limited company. Only then came the identity, the three sub-brands, the vans, the stationery, and the signs.

In May 2011, British Gas bought PH Jones for £30 million. The deal took the social housing work, which by then covered around 250,000 properties. It didn't include Utility Services, which was one of the three businesses the workshop had named, and the family kept it.

I'd love to tell you we planned that. We didn't. Nobody told us why the rebrand was happening, and I'm not going to claim the work caused the sale. The order is all I can vouch for. The business was defined first, the lines between its parts were drawn and named, and less than two years later a buyer bought one part and left another.

Try this on your own business before you brief anyone

You can test where you stand in about 10 minutes.

Write down the businesses you're actually in, the way a buyer would split them if they only wanted one part. Ignore the org chart. If someone could buy it on its own and run it, it goes on its own line.

Then look at the last 10 pieces of work the business you bought has won. For each one, ask whether the customer came because of your name, their name, or the people they deal with. If it's their name, a rebrand that removes it is spending money to throw something away.

If you end up with one line and your name carried the wins, you've got a design job, and it's a fairly straightforward one. If you end up with three lines and you're not sure which name did the work, you haven't got a design problem yet.

Some of what you bought may not belong under your name

When you work through it honestly, you might find that the business you bought should keep its own name. You might find that part of your original business sits better with it than with you. Either way, it means admitting that the acquisition isn't one business yet.

That's uncomfortable, especially if the whole point of the deal was to become one bigger thing. It still costs far less to find out before the rebrand than after it. A rebrand done first fixes the confusion in place, on every van, sign, and invoice, at your expense. And the next person who looks at the business closely, whether that's a buyer, a bank, or a big customer, will see that it's two businesses anyway.

So which job are you actually buying?

You're choosing between a design job and the work of deciding what the business is. They're different pieces of work, and they're often bought as one.

If your directors already agree what the business is, it's written down, and it matches what customers buy, you need a good designer and a clear brief. You don't need me or anyone like me.

If they don't, do the definition first. You can do it yourself with your directors, if you'll ask hard questions about the business you bought and harder ones about your own. Or you can bring someone in for a fixed period to run it with you and hand it back. That's my own work, so treat this as a declared interest rather than a neutral recommendation. The method is Revenue ReSET, built on three pillars [mindset, skillset, toolset]. How I work sets out how it runs, and there are other examples across manufacturing, logistics, and recruitment.

Questions people ask

Do we need a rebrand at all after an acquisition?

No. Plenty of groups run two names for years and do well. You need one when customers, staff, or the people you sell to can't tell what you do any more. That's a sign the definition is missing, and the rebrand is only the visible half of fixing it.

Should we keep the name of the business we bought?

Keep it where customers chose that business because of its name, or where it sells to a different kind of buyer from you. Fold it in where customers were really buying the people and the service, because those carry on whatever's on the van.

How long does deciding what the business is take?

It depends on how far apart the directors are. At PH Jones it took less time than the design: the directors' workshop came first, and the logo was approved the same month.

What if the directors don't agree on what the business is?

Then you've found the real problem, and it's better found in a meeting room than on a set of new signs. Write down each version, find out which one customers actually buy, and decide. If you can't tell which one customers buy, that's its own piece of work, and I've written it up in making sales growth repeatable.

The logo comes last, so give it something to carry

A good identity can carry a clear business a long way. It can't make an unclear one clear, and nobody should be asked to design their way round that. Hand the designer a business that's already been decided, and you'll only pay for the rebrand once.

Nik Stapleton, FCIM. Managing Director, Sapius Commercial Ltd.

Nik Stapleton is a commercial director and AI adviser who fixes B2B sales and marketing so that growth repeats, rather than coming down to luck. He runs his own business and his client work with AI underneath, and keeps the judgement himself. He works in short, fixed-scope sprints on the system underneath that joins the two up, then hands it back to the team. Before that, he spent 22 of his 31 years in commercial work running his own marketing agency. He has sold and delivered £9.3m of work, with client accounts up to £1.6m, and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. He works through Sapius Commercial Ltd, company number 17046077. More at about Nik Stapleton and on LinkedIn.