What Happens to a Brand After You Acquire It with Gwen Lafage

Full Transcript

Lightly edited for filler words, false starts, and crosstalk. Speaker language and phrasing preserved.

Intro + croissants in France

Dmitry: Welcome to What's Your Process? Today I am joined by Gwen Lafage. She is the VP of Marketing, Global Content and Integrated Campaigns at Sinch. Gwen, it is great to see you. How are you?

Gwen: I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Dmitry: It's my pleasure. I've been really looking forward to this one. Any opportunity to pick your brain is a good opportunity in my mind. So what do people need to know about you?

Gwen: I spend my days working at Sinch, which is a communication infrastructure company behind messaging, calls, and email, used by billions of people every day. My job is to make sure that the world knows who we are, that we exist, and why it matters. Outside of that, I've spent most of my career trying to convince people that brand is more than decoration. Outside of work, I am a mom of two. I'm French. I went back to France last summer after 15 years abroad.

Dmitry: Many of us are quite envious of that living-in-France part. I remember when you shared that update last year, I was like, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard, and I've been living vicariously through you ever since. Also, I don't know if you recall, but you were on vacation and you were talking about taking bike rides to the boulangerie to buy fresh bread. I was like, that's just unreal.

Gwen: That's still a part of my day to day now. I've eaten way too many croissants and breads since I moved to France. It's been interesting going back to France after 15 years, but it was the right move at the right time. So, enjoying French joie de vivre.

Dmitry: Beautiful. I'm excited to chat with you today because, when it comes time to reveal this topic, I don't think there are many people in our space who have as much visibility into it as you do.

What is one thing you're world class at?

Dmitry: So, without being vague and mysterious, let's ask the big question. What is one thing you're world class at?

Gwen: Taking a portfolio of acquired brands in the B2B space and turning them into one company that looks, sounds, and acts like it was built that way.

Dmitry: You have some very interesting experience in that area. Can you say more about why you're world class at this?

Gwen: It's interesting, because I became that rather recently in my career, although I had experience with brand architecture and brand strategy for many, many years. In the past five years at Sinch, I joined a company that, I joke, was on a shopping spree. We made a lot of acquisitions and ended up with a large portfolio of brands. Many of the companies we acquired had themselves made acquisitions. So at some point in early 2022, we had a portfolio of 22 brands that we needed to consolidate and make one.

It was definitely a process, not a short one that you can fix in a couple of weeks. It was a long, interesting process that taught me a lot.

Dmitry: Before we jump into the process, why does it matter? Why not just run with 22 separate brands?

Gwen: Unless you are Procter and Gamble and you actually have the budget, the bandwidth, and the size to maintain and grow that many products and brands and create distinctiveness for each of them, it doesn't make sense. When you go through an acquisition, most of the time you expand either from a capabilities perspective or from a geographical perspective, so it makes sense to have all of those products and brands work together. It's never a one-size-fits-all solution. It could make sense for one company to have many brands, but in the tech space, unless you have massive brands and a massive company, there is no point in doing it, because it's just too costly.

That's part of the process. Part of the process is understanding what to keep and what not to keep, and building an actual strategic architecture for the portfolio.

Dmitry: That's a really interesting point. I don't know that a lot of acquiring companies think about what to keep versus what not to keep. There's an idea I've shared in the past called the acquisition tax. You buy a company, you understand the purchase price, you understand the hiring and benefit implications, but what everyone tends to forget is the brand side. There is a whole existing product or service that has its own look, feel, set of values, and people who believe in that culture. I think the assumption is that the acquiring company is just going to bring them in, they're going to roll into the acquiring company, and all that old stuff is just going to disappear. That's not the case, right?

Gwen: It is not. People are attached to the company they worked at and the legacy that comes with it. That's also part of what you buy. So deciding that the one solution is for sure to rebrand and retire the acquired brand might be the best way to actually kill what you just acquired. If the company you acquired has a really strong brand and equity, you might diminish that by rebranding it.

So there is careful consideration to take, whether it's about what keeps the people there, what the market knows, or what the market enjoys. Some customers are also attached to a certain brand and its values. If you change all of it very fast, there's a big risk of losing the value of what you just acquired.

Welcome the new team

Dmitry: Is that where this all starts? An acquisition comes in, and that evaluation is the first step?

Gwen: I will say that the first step is a lot of discussion and welcoming of the new company and the new people. So it's a lot of stakeholder management at first. Even if internally they are not ready to embrace the acquisition and there's a lot of pushback, the whole journey is going to be really tricky. And obviously there are always some doubts and fears, because we all know that with an acquisition, the first thing that comes to mind is redundancies, that everything is going to be consolidated together and everybody is going to lose their jobs. So there is a lot of fear there, and that's something that needs to be worked on.

Just as the value of a company is in its brand, the value of the company might also be in its people. It's not all in the product. It's equally in the culture, the people, the brand. So it's about understanding the true value of everything you've acquired. That's where you start.

Then, from a pure brand perspective, it's spending time understanding the actual company you acquired: the customer, the market position, the audience, what they think about the brand, how they associate it, what you will gain or lose by rebranding, and making a fairer assessment of the risk of rebranding. There's always some risk. So that's where I start. You need to do this brand audit and brand assessment to truly evaluate the pros and cons.

Dmitry: I love that, because it's really easy to just assume. We're buying them, they'll join the party. Or we're buying them, we like what they're doing, we'll just leave them alone. But then people don't know that you own them. There are lots of different permutations of what this could all look like, so I think taking the time to actually assess it and understand it is spot on. Are there things within that audit and assessment that you're specifically looking for when you're trying to decide what to do next?

Gwen: From a brand perspective, we do brand awareness surveys to assess how well the brand is known, how it's appreciated, and what people associate with it. And of course there's a financial aspect as well. How does the company acquire new clients? Is that acquisition very much brand and marketing driven, or is it more relationship driven, for example? What exactly is at the core of it?

At that stage, you probably want to do a pretty deep dive into brand awareness surveys to understand the value of the brand you just acquired, and the awareness, the consideration, the association, and the affinity with the brand.

Dmitry: I'm going to lead you in this conversation, if that's okay. I want to go through the rebrand process here. Let's start with the "not." When you get those responses and start seeing whatever you're seeing, what makes you think, you know what, let's leave this alone, versus let's go ahead and bring it in?

Gwen: It's leave it alone or bring it in, and everything in between. How fast do you go into bringing it together? At Sinch, for a certain acquisition, we went pretty fast and just rebranded the company and said, okay, this becomes Sinch and becomes part of the portfolio. There was not a strong acquisition funnel, not a strong brand-led acquisition in some ways, and not a lot of awareness. It was pretty niche. The Sinch brand was maybe stronger than the acquired brand. It was a more global brand, versus a very local one that needed to shift and embrace that more global appeal.

On the other side is leaving it completely alone. It might be because they are so different in some ways, or they have a completely different audience, and there's not a lot of synergy from an upsell, cross-sell perspective, so they would not benefit from a strong integration. But usually you'll end up somewhere in the middle. It's never black or white. It's kind of in the middle, where it'll be, okay, they will benefit from belonging to this bigger company, we could do some upsell and cross-sell, and at the same time they have a strong acquisition funnel that we don't want to damage, so we need to be careful about how we approach things. That's when you usually do more of an incremental change, so that you go through a little bit of a process.

For us, I'll take the example of Mailgun, which is an email infrastructure and email API company targeted at technical audiences and developers, pretty well known in developer circles, respected, with great products. At first, there was not a lot of desire on either side to go too fast into rebranding everything, because the risks were higher than the benefits or the future potential benefits. So we needed to first align on the products, and align on the culture and the people, and make sure it would come together in a good way.

Once we got to a point where things belonged better together, because there were synergies within the audiences and good use cases of cross-selling, with clients who will buy messaging and email, there became more of a case for bringing them closer. So we went from a little "Mailgun by Sinch."

Dmitry: Yeah, little logo.

Gwen: Exactly. At first you have nothing, then you have a little "by Sinch," or a Sinch company. Then you evolve it to where we are today, which is Sinch Mailgun, making the brand closer to the Sinch family. We've built this branded house where all of the company or product brands work together with the master brand, while also retaining some of their personalities.

It's about finding that balance between maintaining some personality in the brand or in the product and belonging to something bigger, so that it strengthens the master brand, the name Sinch is seen, and it belongs as a product of that family, but it also maintains its own brand affinity with a developer audience. Now we are at this stage where it's becoming a lot closer, but it's keeping its name. We're still making progress in that consolidation, but not doing it by instinct or without thinking through the consequences.

Dmitry: The detail in that is excellent. I have two separate questions. First, apparently brand has influence on business. It's not just making things look pretty. There's an impact on the bottom line.

Gwen: No way. I think, for some audiences, there is a whole history and a whole legacy attached to that brand that goes beyond just the product.

Dmitry: You're kidding me. Unbelievable.

Gwen: People might not find the product anymore if you call it something else. It's more than a brand decision from a marketing perspective. Like you said, it's a business decision. There is a need to have a clear framework and a clear business mindset behind it, so it's not just, let's put a coat of paint on it and then rip it all out.

Help everyone understand the timeline

Dmitry: You talked about the pipelines, about awareness and affinity, and there's a knock-on effect from one thing to the next. That leads to my other question, your point about doing it over time, where it makes sense. I'm sure there have been acquisitions where it's, no, let's just slap a coat of paint on it, that's all it needs. But Mailgun is this great example of a loyal customer base, a user base that's somewhat different from Sinch's regular ICP. We're going to leave you be for a minute, then we're going to throw on "by Sinch," and now it's fully integrated. That wasn't a two-week sprint. How long?

Gwen: We've been in this process of consolidation for, say, four years. Rebranding from a brand and color perspective can be pretty fast. It's a lot faster than the product consolidation, and it's a lot faster than the people consolidation, in a way, because I think we underestimate the importance of change management inside the company to make it one unified company. People internally need to believe so that they can also share that externally. So it takes some time. You can see some resistance, and if there's resistance internally, you can be sure it's going to be really hard to make it a success externally. Either you will lose a lot of the people or you will lose what made the value of it in the first place.

That's why you need a process to see this through, depending on how people feel internally, but also what the data says and the risk associated with it. So the process can be rather long, and it takes time for people internally to belong together at one company. Each company, even companies that say, we don't have a brand, well, as soon as you have a company, you have a brand in name, and you build that from very early on with the personality and the brand of your founder.

Dmitry: Yeah, just losing control of it.

Gwen: Most companies start there. So whether it's written somewhere or not, there is a culture and some values and some codes that belong to a company. When companies merge, there's a need to make the fusion bigger than the individuals. That's also what we think at Sinch, this one plus one equals three. How do we make sure we make the most of that consolidation?

I think that journey we went on, and our growth journey, whether it was organic or through acquisition, made us a lot stronger, because we became a very global company with true local presence and local understanding. This mix of culture and people today makes a big part of who we are, which I personally think is great. I really like that about Sinch as well. Part of it is because we grew that way and became a fusion of a lot of different good things together. It just takes, like I mentioned, a lot of change management to make something bigger than the sum of its parts.

Dmitry: This might be too in the weeds, but how do you convince the execs who just spent a lot of company dollars on an acquisition that this might take four years to see the finish line? I imagine there are going to be people who listen to this and think, four years, get out of here, we did that in three weeks and that was it. Can you talk through that a little bit?

Gwen: I think it's in the culture as well. Sinch being a Swedish company, there is a culture of listening that is pretty strong. Not going to lie, there were some moments when I just wished we could rip the bandage off and say, hey, can we go faster here? Because this is painful. But what in a way may have slowed us down, and wasn't a bad thing in the end, is that we made a lot of acquisitions all at once, so we had to take each one after the other. In the case of Mailgun, it was, this is strong as is, let's not touch something that works and fix something else in the meantime. So we took that time, not because we were not doing anything, but because we were consolidating other products and other brands.

There's no way you can go from 22 brands to, I would say today, one master brand and five sub brands in a year. You need to take it piece by piece and fix one thing at a time. To get a little bit in the weeds, yes, you think about, let's change our logo. That's easy. But we're talking products, we're talking websites, we're talking all of the material, the sales decks, everything that the company is using day in, day out. A rebrand is a lot of work when you do it on one brand and one company, and then you multiply that. It multiplies the amount of work.

I think when execs buy a company, they don't need a lot of convincing to keep running something that's working well. It's more the opposite: let's make sure we don't destroy the value of what we bought. There might be a bit of a cultural effect, too. Some of the people in the company had seen what it can do to buy a company and just kill it. That happened to a lot of acquisitions. So they were mindful and intentional about how we were making that journey.

At some point, though, we also saw the confusion it brought to the market. On the other end of the spectrum, it was confusing to see that there were so many things happening. At some point we didn't look like one company, and people were wondering, okay, what does Sinch actually do, because you have all of these brands. A lot of people also had no idea that certain products belonged to Sinch, and that we were a lot bigger than most people knew, because they could see who Sinch was five or six years ago. The reality was a completely different picture.

Dmitry: That's some brand 101 thinking, around what you want to be known for. Sinch was known for something five or six years ago, but Sinch today is a completely different company. All of those individual sub brands were known for something, but they weren't known for that alongside Sinch. There's this idea around acquisitions where the acquirer acquires a brand and that brand becomes part of it, but the acquiring brand transforms as well, and I don't think enough people think about that. That's such a great illustration of it. We're not who we were five or six years ago, and we're also not that company that has 22 different acquired companies. You are one brand with five sub brands, and that's a very different place to be. Was that the target for you? Was it going to be just the Sinch brand and a few select sub brands, or was there a world where it was just one Sinch brand? Was there a world where it continued to be 22 separate brands?

Gwen: I think 22 separate brands was never really an option. Going back to what we discussed at the beginning, maintaining that and changing at speed with that much complexity internally, and even for the market, it was super confusing. And again, we are who we are because of all of it coming together.

Dmitry: Just do it with AI, Gwen. It's easy.

Gwen: If we put this in perspective of how analysts see us, we are one of the top two or three communications infrastructure players. The reason for that is all of the products and all of the geographical footprint that we now have. So our positioning had to change, our messaging had to change, our visual identity had to evolve to broaden its perspective and also welcome more audiences. That's the complexity of having a multi-product portfolio, rather than one SaaS platform where you have one clear audience and one product.

Whether you've built it or you acquired it, if you have multiple products, you know you will have products for different types of audiences, but you still need to have an overall, overarching narrative of why all of this works together. And yes, that definitely has a big effect on the acquiring company. Our story has evolved a lot, and our brand identity, finally, this year as well, evolved quite a lot to become more global, more mature, more open to all of those acquired brands, so that it's flexible enough that it can allow for targeting different personas and going after different verticals. It's also mature and extensive enough, with enough aspects to the brand, to be able to create those variations and personalities for the product brands.

Dmitry: That's really interesting, because it goes back to the parent brand, that top layer. The identity needs to be clear there: the goals, the culture. If you're transforming these acquired brands into something, you need to know what you're transforming them into. It's not just, Sinch is a yellow brand, so we're going to slap yellow on all of these. Mailgun is a great example. Let's go back to that. Historically, Mailgun has been a red brand. If you're a loyal Mailgun customer, you're using it every day, and you're happy with the service, and then one day you show up and not only is the Mailgun logo completely gone, replaced by Sinch, but everything that was once red is now yellow. You're going to be so lost and so confused. You have to be thoughtful about how you are transparent. It's like, you can't date someone until you know who you are as a person. You have to figure out who you are as a brand, and then you understand which traits of that can carry over versus which traits of the acquired brand have to stay. Am I crazy?

Gwen: I like that analogy, because you become a couple, but you keep your own personality. Obviously you also change and have common values and a common way of doing things. You live together day in and day out, and you're still a unique person. Those personalities get a bit mixed sometimes. You evolve, your partner evolves, you become closer together. You have kids?

Dmitry: Yeah, they become weird little versions of you both.

Gwen: Exactly. So it's a little bit of that. Everyone takes the same family name, but then they all have their little personality. I would say a branded house is a bit of that, rather than a house of brands, which is more like a group of friends that hang out together but have nothing to do with each other. Although you can argue that long-term friends can also influence each other.

When you become a family and become closer, in the case of brands, you have to make it happen, because it will not happen as naturally. Although internally, if we believe that brand is bigger than just the decoration and the logo and the colors, and it's the values and the people inside, part of it is also happening organically. We have people within Sinch who come from so many different companies, and they are still here after many years of being acquired. That also means that they've embraced becoming part of Sinch. At first, they were like, no, I'm Mailgun. Now, I think it takes time to embrace that idea of what the culture of the company is and identify with it: I belong to Sinch, and the product I take care of is Mailgun.

So I think it needs to be a journey, because even if you want everything to go super fast, especially now with AI, nothing has ever been as fast as now, we know that what takes time is changing the people, change management, and culture. That hasn't sped up as fast as AI.

Dmitry: Humans are still the biggest variable in everything. Even with the six brands total within Sinch, if each of them had their own teams, you would have decentralized everything, and you'd still lose that connective tissue between the Sinch brand and the sub brands. Everyone would be using different software, different guidelines, different thoughts and ideas. It doesn't work. So there's a centralization that needs to happen to get everyone on the same page. You can't just say, hey, Mailjet designer, Mailgun designer, you're a Sinch designer now, welcome, and that's it. There's an onboarding period. You have to answer questions, you have to teach, you have to deal with headaches. You're also going to hear, tell me about your process, and maybe bring some of those things into the overall Sinch process. We've touched on the impact of the acquired brand on the acquiring brand. It's a really big deal, and that doesn't come from software. It doesn't come from product. Yes, those are all part of it, but it comes from the people.

Gwen: It does. I think evolving all of it together is also a better way than forcing a new company to take on everything that was already there, because that will always make them feel like, oh, we're taking your old clothes rather than buying new ones for everybody. It's an opportunity to really refresh things and evolve. I believe that a brand is alive. It's never static. So it's about how you evolve to welcome this new company and this new brand in. It should move things, because there are new people, new elements, new ideas, so it's kind of normal that it makes things evolve, which I think is a good thing.

In general, companies are not afraid of a brand refresh, especially in tech. You feel like there are so many brand refreshes all the time. At least this is a good reason to do it. I think it's a better reason than, we have a new CMO who just doesn't like join. So when there's an acquisition happening, and you change your positioning, and your narrative needs to evolve, and maybe your audience is evolving a little bit and you have a better story to tell, it's kind of normal to evolve the visual identity as well.

Build the system

Dmitry: Let me ask you this, switching gears a little bit. Having to align and consolidate 22 brands is not for the faint of heart, and I also don't know that most listeners are going to find themselves in that same situation. Conversely, if you're sitting there and it's your first acquisition, or you've gone through two now, are you approaching it the same way? Is the process more or less similar in your mind?

Gwen: I think it's similar, a bit at a different scale, but I think the same things matter. I always think you would want to approach it in a very similar way: understand what you have acquired, map stakeholders on both sides, think about the architecture and how the two brands are going to live and coexist and what you want them to evolve to. Look at what the end state is. Is your desire that one day they are just completely united and there's just one brand, or does it make sense to keep them as two products? So think about that architecture, and then sequence the change in a realistic way.

What we haven't really touched on is how you build a system. Build a system so that you make it easy for the people in the global team and in all the product teams to embrace the change, whether it's through the guidelines, the templates, the governance, and all the tools you can provide. That's the last part of the consolidation, because it's easy to make it in a PDF and say, this is how it's going to be. But the details and the reality of it come in actually pushing this live. And six months after the launch, how are you doing? How are things in reality?

Building the system from the ground up is where you need to give the tools to empower the people. That's where things are going more and more: enabling people to be more independent, so that you don't have to play brand police, and instead become the enabler to the rest of the company.

Dmitry: When you're thinking about these systems and tools, what stands out to you as critical?

Gwen: It's really important to have brand guidelines that are not just a PDF but a kind of brand hub, whether it's a DAM or live, online guidelines. Then, building the right templates. For us, it starts with building the right elements for designers, and for that we use Figma. Then we build all of the templates for the non-designers, and for that we use Canva. And then establishing the process and training the people.

I talk a lot about PowerPoint, regularly, because I feel it's the biggest pain in any brand refresh. You spend so much time making everything beautiful, and your website, and I think I've said before that your beautiful brand refresh comes to die in your PowerPoint, because it's the face of the company very often, in the sales deck, for example. And that's the hardest part to change, because there's not one place to change it. It's everywhere across the company. It's still a tool that is made for another era. So making it a good tool, easy to use, is almost mission impossible, because it's a pain for anybody, and yet we all use it.

Dmitry: Is that something that should be considered as you're thinking about legacy materials? If you've been at Sinch for 10 years and you've seen three different Sinch brands, you have slide decks from all the different eras. Then you bring in additional new companies that have their own legacy slide decks as well. That's got to be really tricky, because now you're talking 22 times three, and the numbers get pretty big.

Gwen: It can be pretty daunting, to be honest. I think you have to keep an open mindset that it's never going to be perfect. You're never going to be able to refresh every single asset everywhere. It's impossible. Also, every company needs to be moving forward, so you don't want to refresh something that is barely used. It's better to create something new going forward, but that does mean some stuff will never get refreshed and people might use it. It's impossible to keep track of everything that is being done within a company like Sinch. When we have more than 4,000 people, you cannot be after everything that gets created, especially in PowerPoint or Word docs. So you need to start with the most visible, and provide that flexibility.

What we've done with PowerPoint is, of course, a template with a lot of master slides that people can use, but also examples of what good slides look like. Then we built libraries of slides that people can actually grab and put into their decks. And now we have a kind of PowerPoint extender tool where people can go from PowerPoint to a brand hub and grab the right images and the right icons. So many people inside a company live in PowerPoint and make decks all day long. I think this is also why we still have PowerPoint and no other company has managed to replace it, because it's so ingrained in company culture.

Dmitry: If you don't break the habit, and I know this is a broader decision, but if the software doesn't change, and you're adding new software to the mix without replacing software, you're just exacerbating the issue. You're making it bigger, and you're teaching people that it's okay. I've worked at places that just cut 365 licenses or Adobe Creative Cloud licenses. At first people were shocked: how will we ever survive, how will we ever make a deck again? Google Slides works, Canva works, you can make decks in Figma now too. I get that not everyone needs licenses to all of those things, but there's a level here, and this goes back to your point on change management, where it's also, you know what, this is a new era of the brand, and we're also going to think about tooling.

We see the PowerPoint thing with lots of clients, and a lot of the time it's not because they're all sitting there thinking, I love PowerPoint. It's literally that we've had PowerPoint forever, so we can't imagine getting rid of it. Then you get rid of it and life moves on.

Gwen: The tooling part is a really important one, and an interesting one, especially now, with all the changes that are going to happen from a tooling perspective and all the things people are going to be able to make with AI. I think it will evolve our relationship to tooling even more. But it's still going to take some time before companies, especially larger ones, shift.

What's next?

Dmitry: Let me ask you this, because I know we're up against time. Is there anything that we haven't necessarily covered today, or any part of the process that you'd want to mention?

Gwen: In this section of What's Your Process, I will say we've covered most of it.

Dmitry: All right, well, in that case, what's next? Where can we see this process in action?

Gwen: I think we are now basically stress testing this work that we've done for many years, which has come to the surface. You can see the Sinch brand has evolved on our Sinch website, and we also have a brand hub with a public-facing part, brand.sinch.com, where you can see the top level of the brand identity. Progressively, over the next few months, we'll change some of the other sub brands. The Mailjet and Mailgun websites will evolve. All of it is going to come together. Again, it's an evolution, because no team can do it all at once. But we'll finally have the right foundation to build on, and I think that's something a lot of companies forget.

That's why this might take time. It's better to take the time to build the right foundations. Going back to AI, this is how you will enable people to do things with AI at scale. If you don't have the right foundation, people will just do whatever and not be on brand. So you first need to establish those big foundations, and that takes time. To build a sophisticated brand means there are a lot of different assets and categories of assets that you need to build from the start.

Dmitry: That's awesome. I love how thoughtful you are within all of this. I love how detailed you are, because there are so many small steps. It's not the big flashy things. It's all the little things that make it work, and all the thought and the timelines and the planning and the change management and the stakeholder management and the research. Thank you so much for walking through this. Everyone, give Gwen a follow on LinkedIn. She's fantastic. Check out Sinch, check out all the sub brands. I'm going to plug OhSNAP!, because we helped, and I feel very fortunate to have done that. Gwen, thank you so much.