Global M&A deal values rose 36% between 2024 and 2025. Megadeals are back. Boards are moving fast. And most of them will underdeliver.
The failure rate for mergers and acquisitions has stayed stubbornly consistent for decades. Somewhere between 50% and 70% fail to deliver the value they promised. Harvard Business Review, KPMG and Forbes have all run the numbers at different times and come to the same conclusion. The money is there. The deals are happening. But the value is not.
The reason is almost never strategy. Strategy gets scrutinised, stress-tested, signed off by advisers and approved by boards. What kills M&A value is culture. And culture is invisible until you give it a name, a voice and a face.
That is what M&A branding does.
The brand is not cosmetic
The most common mistake in M&A branding is treating it as a finishing touch: something that happens after the deal is done, after the integration plan is written, after the name is decided in a boardroom without involving anyone who actually has to use it.
A new logo on an unchanged reality does not fool anyone. People on the inside know when the rhetoric does not match what is actually happening. People on the outside can feel when an organisation has not yet worked out what it believes.
Research from FT Prentice Hall’s Creating Value from Mergers and Acquisitions identifies the factors that separate successful acquisitions from unsuccessful ones. Clear vision communicated appeared in 68% of successful deals. No clear vision appeared in 67% of unsuccessful ones. The same pattern holds for management credibility, people focus, and how well the transition is managed. The hard commercial levers matter, but the soft cultural ones are what tip the outcome.
Brand is where those cultural decisions become visible and concrete.
What it actually does
01 / It gives people something to believe in
In a merger, people on both sides are watching for signals. What does this mean for me? Who is in charge now? What do we actually stand for? The brand answers those questions before rumour does.
02 / It establishes who is in charge of the narrative
Organisations that define their new positioning clearly before the deal is announced are far better placed than those scrambling to explain themselves after. The brand is the narrative. It does not emerge naturally. It has to be built.
03 / It resolves the architecture question
Two businesses becoming one always creates complexity: what happens to the existing names? Which brands survive? Which get absorbed? Which get retired? These are not just aesthetic questions. They affect client relationships, commercial positioning and employee identity. Getting them right requires strategy, not guesswork.
04 / It makes the internal transition work
The external brand is what clients and markets see. The internal brand is what actually drives behaviour. Organisations that invest in helping their people understand and inhabit the new positioning are the ones that come out the other side coherent. The ones that skip this step spend years trying to fix a culture problem with a communications budget.
05 / It accelerates value creation
AMT-Sybex came to us needing to be investor-ready. Their portfolio was a tangle of technical acronyms that meant nothing to anyone outside the business. We renamed the products, restructured the architecture, and created a coherent offer that was easy to understand and easy to sell. They were acquired by Capita for €100m. The brand did not just signal the value. It helped create it.
The harder question
Before any of the above is possible, someone has to answer the question that most organisations try to avoid in the middle of a deal: what do we actually stand for now?
It is harder than it sounds. Two leadership teams with different cultures, different values, different ways of doing things have to agree on a version of the truth that is honest, compelling and one that both sides can inhabit. That conversation is uncomfortable. It surfaces disagreements that were papered over in the deal negotiations. It forces decisions that nobody wanted to make.
But if you do not make them in the room with us, you will spend years making them through attrition, turnover and underperformance.
Kennedys had a clear ambition when they first briefed us: grow through acquisition across multiple jurisdictions, and do it without the organisation fragmenting. The brand we created was bold enough to hold all of that together. Two decades and 47 offices later, it still does. Turnover has grown by 970%. The brand did not follow the strategy. It enabled it.
FIS was formed from the merger of two trade bodies under a name that reflected neither of them and inspired nobody. Our brief was to create something the leadership team, and the people on the ground, could actually believe in. The result was FIS: short, strong, immediately usable.
“We’re now one organisation and culturally the same.” David Frise, CEO, FIS
That is the job. Not a logo. Not a colour. An organisation that knows who it is.
