How I designed our company’s brand post-acquisition

Planning on how your startup’s brand will be structured for the long term is always difficult because it is incredibly hard to forecast where your company will be in the next four or six years. But putting together a proper structure, and including brand architecture discussions in the initial stages, can help avoid numerous headaches.

Brand architecture refers to how a company establishes its brand in relation to its products and sub-brands. A badly designed brand architecture can create confusion among consumers and damage the brand’s equity.

Having gone through this process myself (for both my Malaysia-based startup Hyperlab and our parent company Everise), I have become intimately familiar with the challenges and benefits of defining a brand’s architecture.

Let’s dig in.

Firstly, a bit of background

I co-founded Hyperlab a few years ago in Kuala Lumpur with my partners in crime Janet Teo and Vic Sithasanan. We wanted to create a conversational AI platform for enterprises (think chatbots), fusing robotic process automation with AI, natural language processing, speech recognition, and contextual awareness.

So far, so good. We were enjoying life as a successful startup.

Then, we were acquired by Everise, a Singapore-based experience company, bringing myself and the Hyperlab leadership team into their own management group. Every startup founder dreams of eventually being acquired, and this was no different.

What was different was that I was tasked with planning and building the structure of the company, now that the firm had acquired some marquee brands and was growing rapidly with over 12,000 employees round the world.

While a young company, Everise also owns C3 (a US-based customer experience firm with centers in the Philippines, the US, and Guatemala), Globee (a Malaysian business services firm), and Trusource Labs (a customer services firm specializing in IoT).

However, growth in itself is no guarantee of sustained success. And if we were to present ourselves to the outside world in a coherent and clear manner, we would need to structure the wider company.

I had three main options:

1. Master brand (aka, branded house)

Some examples of this model include Hewlett-Packard (before it split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc) and Google (before they created Alphabet). In this model, all sub-companies, products, and services come under the master brand and share the same market position, customers, and budget.

It creates consistency and, at the same time, limits companies as to the customer base they can reach. Their brand positioning is now dictated by the master brand.

2. Endorsed brand

Creating a united company