Following a positive reception at the Marketing Science Institute conference earlier this month, we have been working hard to expand our data set of mergers so as to be able to perform the analysis at a more granular level.
The MSI presentation was only able to divide the data set into three categories – firms that had adopted the “acquirer brand is the last man standing” vs. firms that had adopted the “business as usual” approach (leaving the acquired company to operate as an unendorsed subsidiary) vs. firms that had adopted any of the 8 more “sophisticated” strategies.
We have now categorized over 1,000 M&A transactions of greater than $500mn since 1995. In some of these transactions the discrepancy in size/value of the two parties was so large that it is hard to imagine that there was any serious thought given to merging the identities. So we are going to tag the transactions by whether they were “mergers” or “acquisitions” – the reason for doing so is to be able to compare the “sophisticated” strategies (any of which would only be considered under merger conditions) against a narrower peer set of merger transactions that adopted either of the two more “expedient” strategies.
The good news is that we have around 180 instances in which “sophisticated” strategies were adopted so can do some analysis about the relative performance of individual strategies.
