TL;DR: After going through four acquisitions and leading multiple rebrands, I’ve learned that communication, planning, and trust are everything. Here’s what worked—and what didn’t.
On my birthday in 2013, I got a gift I didn’t want: news that we had been acquired.
Acquisitions are a chaotic time. There is a lot of uncertainty because decisions must be made in numerous areas of the business. There can be a rush to claim power, and things can get messy if communication isn’t clear.
While at Extreme Networks, I led creative and digital teams through several acquisitions. The advantage of doing this work multiple times is that our team got really good at knowing what had to be done, in what order, and then executing on that plan.
The first acquisition was the biggest project I ever worked on, but we’ll come back to that.
The second acquisition was pretty straightforward. We were acquiring the wireless business unit from Zebra, which Zebra had previously purchased from Motorola. These poor people were acquired twice in a short amount of time. They hadn’t even finished their previous acquisition before they were sold off to Extreme.
Our job was to rebrand all of the Zebra wireless content so it was all branded as Extreme. It was then posted to all the proper places such as the marketing website, the customer portal, communities, and more. Myself and a few others from the marketing leadership team flew out to Chicago to meet with the Zebra marketing team to outline what both teams needed and what our process would look like.
The third and fourth acquisitions were challenging because they occurred simultaneously. Three weeks after Extreme announced its intention to acquire Avaya’s networking business, Extreme announced it was also acquiring Brocade’s SRA (switching, routing, and analytics) business. At one point, I flew out to San Jose, CA, to attend a three-hour planning meeting at Brocade.
We worked with both teams to ensure that all assets were rebranded and live on the website by the time the deal was signed and the press release was issued. Our comms team had a master spreadsheet that tracked every touchpoint along the way.
We were lucky to have great partners on the other side of these acquisitions because they knew where everything was and what needed to come over to be rebranded.
These were easy compared to the first acquisition.
Start from Scratch
The first acquisition, the one that landed on my birthday, was the largest and most daunting. I had been working as the creative services manager at Enterasys when it was announced that we were being acquired by Extreme. Long story short, our CMO, Vala Afshar, was named CMO of the new combined company. This was good because it meant I would be leading the creative efforts during the transition and beyond.
Our new CEO informed Vala that once the deal closed, we had 90 days to come up with a new visual identity and rebrand everything. A few years earlier, this CEO had been the CMO of Apple, so he knew about doing the impossible.
At Enterasys, we were 10-15 days away from launching our new site when news broke that we were being acquired. Now, we needed to update the design and development to reflect this new company that was twice the size. We re-engaged the design agency (Fresh Tilled Soil) and the development agency (Convertiv). For new work, we brought in a branding agency (Tank) and a video agency (IndieWhip, now The Video Bros) to help create the new face of our company.
Coordinating all of this work, along with updating everything with the Enterasys or Extreme logo – from business cards to tradeshow booths to data sheets – meant that we didn’t sleep much during the early part of 2014.
Process
When I started at Enterasys, my first order of business was getting all the source files from our agencies and establishing a system to catalog them and the work that needed to be done.
Here’s how we kept our heads above water:
- Centralized storage: We used Box to house all creative assets.
- Asset numbering: Every file got a unique ID, so edits were clean and traceable.
- Process discipline: We tracked version history and ownership to avoid confusion.
During the Enterasys acquisition, one of the marketing managers on the Extreme side asked if I had worked at an agency. I had, but I wanted to know why she asked that. She said she could tell by how I organized the process, tracking system, and files.
We had hundreds of pieces of collateral that needed to be dropped into new templates. I’m still so thankful that we had a dedicated team of designers who would work tirelessly to get all of that work accomplished. We knew what time the lights automatically went out in the building (10:00pm) and what time they turn on (6:00am). We basically lived on delivery food and soda for a couple of months.
Results
The acquisitions became a reset button for our branding. We were able to:
- Clean up and standardize all marketing collateral
- Rebuild product documentation in new templates
- Launch a fresh, on-brand website on day one
- Avoid the awkward “old logo” phase completely
Oh, also on day one, we launched the new website, announced a partnership with the NFL, launched our biggest product in years, and had an analyst panel livestreamed from our Salem, NH office.
Pre-announcements
One thing that you don’t often hear about is the work that goes into the initial acquisition announcement. If either company is a public company, which Extreme is, it means that there could be insider trading if the acquisition information falls into the wrong hands. I would have to sign a form saying I wouldn’t tell anyone the information I had, and I couldn’t buy or sell any stock related to the deal.
It also meant I couldn’t tell my team what was going on.
This was tricky since we all worked on the same source files and the same website. I remember with the later announcements having to make staging pages on our website in areas that my web manager wouldn’t see. I would get it approved, back it up, then delete it. Once the press release went out, I would turn on those pages and push the announcements on social (I also oversaw digital and social, in addition to creative).
People choose unhappiness over uncertainty – Tim Ferriss
Having done this work multiple times means I know the most important parts: Communication and planning. The biggest part of any acquisition is being as transparent as possible with everyone affected by this. Acquisitions often come with layoffs … sorry, I meant efficiency improvements. People understandably freak out about this. If you can get people to stop worrying, they’re able to focus on the monumental task ahead of them. That’s where planning comes in.
What makes a rebrand during acquisition successful?
- Transparent communication: Fear thrives in silence. Share what you can, early and often.
- Solid planning: Know what needs to be done, in what order, and by whom.
- Expect hiccups: Aligning priorities across teams is hard. Plan for it.
- Build trust: The goodwill you bank now will save you when deadlines tighten.
Projects of this magnitude require a lot of people to do the right thing when they’re supposed to. Just remember that your priorities may not align with their priorities.
This is where building trust and being a good partner will help more than you could imagine. There were times when I had to call in big favors in order to hit some deliverable timelines. Most of the time, I’d hear things like, “You’ve bailed me out so many times, whatever you need.”
Start by being helpful. That’s how you earn the trust you’ll need when the impossible shows up on your to-do list.
Read further
Want a deeper dive? Kapost did a write-up on how we managed the later acquisitions, and I shared more about rebranding after the Enterasys acquisition on my blog.
If this helped you, follow me for more lessons from the creative trenches.