The past week I have been immersed in a deep drill into the role of brand strategy during M&A. This is a topic I have written about from a qualitative point of view before (see the links to the published articles to the right of this post), but the time has now come to add some financial teeth to the analysis.
I am defining the question as “is there evidence from the capital markets that certain forms of brand strategy are associated with superior post merger financial performance and valuation?”
I specifically want to test whether the more expedient strategies (those involve the least thought and/or work) are associated with disappointing post merger performance because they fail to address the human desire to understand how the merged company will be superior to its two constituent parts.
I present the preliminary results at the Marketing Science Institute’s INFORMS conference in 3 weeks so the pressure is on…
