Mergers and acquisitions are critical to the running of the economy. They act as buoys keeping struggling companies afloat and in some cases even breathing new life into dead ducks. KPMG came to the rescue of Arthur Andersen after Enron and just last month Oracle acquired Siebel Systems although in less controversial circumstances than the former.
Though with every Yang there’s a Yin and, when it comes to acquisitions jobs, morale and brands, are all in the firing line. Redundancies are dealt with sensitively, morale is boosted, brands are dropped. C’est la vie. Brands are inanimate, easily disposable and on a hierarchy of tragedy they do not rate.
But if you are marketing director and you’ve done a good job creating a brand, communicating its values and inspiring affection for it amongst employees and customers, this has got to be gutting. People compare work projects to babies with a brand or something that you actually conceptualise and then nurture and develop, this phrase is scarily close to the truth. One acquisition and it’s destroyed, taken away. Even its mementoes carefully crafted on mugs and mousemats are purged.
In 1996 Fausto Amoroso joined the Siemens Network as head of marketing. In 1999 Siemens sold this division to a group of venture capitalists (KKR) and Amoroso, now as director of marketing, rebranded to Omnetica. Five years later the Kingston Communications Group bought Omnetica and at the beginning of this year Amoroso had to eradicate the old and rebrand again. Today he is director of marketing for Affiniti.
Omentica is no more and Siemens Network Systems a distant memory. Two babies committed to the brand’s graveyard. Faced with a rebrand does Amoroso feel despondent? Not at first. As a marketer it’s a great challenge to start from scratch, from the initial concept. The motivation is there there’s no issue with that. Then a chink opens and some remorse seeps through. It would have been nice to develop the Omnetica brand more. It is disappointing: you get attached to a brand and a lot of people want to keep it going. And finally the chink is closed: The disappointment is short-lived, the more you get into the new brand, thinking about the new brand… it’s almost self-motivating.
Amoroso is genuine. He gets attached to the brands, but when faced with their deletion he doesn’t look back. With so much practice he’s also become something of a master at organising and executing a rebrand project, but before we learn how he does it, it’s best to understand where he does it.
Born in the Calabria region of Southern Italy, Amoroso’s family moved to Milton Keynes when he was six years old. And while there’s no mistaking his Italian pedigree Amoroso’s life has been entrenched in the UK; even his football loyalties lie with Chelsea rather than Juventus or AC Milan. A degree in electrical engineering from Aston University in Birmingham, followed by a three-year stint as a design engineer in the BT research labs, positioned him perfectly for a career in IT/telecoms marketing.
Affiniti is a communications integrator. Amoroso explains: We don’t manufacture anything. We take technology from suppliers like Nortel or Cisco and bring it all together. We design, implement and manage communications systems.
A self-confessed techy at heart Amoroso sees this as an advantage. When you’re marketing director of a technology company, you need to understand and have an appreciation of it. But how does a techy fare on the marketing field, particularly in the notoriously non-technical area of brand?
To begin he doesn’t talk about technology. We still love talking about technology, but we have to move away from that. Technology is the enabler but it should not be the starting point. So what does he talk about? Or more accurately who does he talk to? Everyone, it seems. With rebranding, communication is key, internally and externally, he says.
When Omnetica was taken over by Kingston Communications, 10 marketing people (five from each company) came together and broke down the task into work streams for external communication, internal communications, collateral, website development and formation of the new brand. As director of marketing, Amoroso oversaw everything, but paid particular attention to the brand team. We took the decision very early on that we weren’t going to adopt either of the old brands even though both were well established. It wouldn’t give the right message to the market. People would think ‘they’ve just added a bit on’. This was an opportunity to go out to the marketplace and make a statement about what we are and who we are.
Before he could introduce the new company Amoroso needed a name. A number of agencies pitched ideas and one stood out for two reasons: its audacity in only pitching one idea (the competition pitched at least six) and the fact that the name was perfect. Base One came up with ‘Affiniti’. Amoroso recalls, I asked Richard [Richard Bush, joint MD of Base One] ‘what if we didn’t like it?’ but he was absolutely convinced. It was a risky strategy but it gave them an opportunity to explain the brand in a lot more depth than the others who were trying to explain six ideas in the same time. And the explanation that the 10 marketers heard from Base One sounded something like this: Research finds that the telecoms sector does not have a great reputation for delivering good customer service. The competition is focusing on technology, which is important but there is a need for a company that can look at how they do business with the customer. That’s what Affiniti is about getting closer to the customer.
Amoroso liked it but admits that securing the URL ‘affiniti.com’ was the big decider. This was very important because it’s the first thing that people do and ‘.com’ is the first choice. Bizarrely ‘.co.uk’ was already taken by a marketing consultancy.
Christening Affiniti’s predecessor, Omnetica, demanded a little more imagination. Amoroso explains it was made-up of three words: ‘net’ in the middle for network, ‘Omni’ for all encompassing and ‘ica’ at the end just to finish it off. And who says B2B marketers lack creativity?
Amoroso may be a techy but no-one could flaw his understanding of brand. But what of Affiniti’s 1400 employees predominantly sales people and engineers? How could he convince the recently-converted Omnetica staff that Affiniti was actually where their loyalties should lie? The solution was one which would resonate with its audience: an instruction manual. Two booklets were published: one about the brand and the other was a guide to living it not in an over-zealous, ‘eat, sleep and drink it’ way but in a practical sense ie. how to answer the telephone and what email signatures should say.
However to impart the meaning behind the new brand an event was organised for the whole company. Organised by Opus Creative Marketing it brought together 800 employees and included a 40-minute presentation from the CEO of the Kingston Group and the director of Affiniti. This was followed by activities which were intended to better people’s understanding of the brand as well as encourage team work.
In one activity staff had to present the brand to their colleagues in one minute. Amoroso says, We got some amusing presentations people singing and acting but they did actually reiterate a lot of stuff from the formal presentations. We thought about karting or something like that, but this forced them to think about the business. We wanted them to leave the event as one team and one that understood the new brand.
Where Amoroso’s approach to internal communication is intense and rings with all of the relevant bells and whistles, his strategy on the outside is simpler. His path to the CTOs, CIOs, data, IT and telecoms managers is one bereft of frilly and fancy marketing techniques. If Jamie Oliver is the Naked Chef then perhaps Amoroso is the Naked Marketer.
While the launch of Affiniti was supported by the requisite PR and advertising, the ongoing activity is simple face-to-face, the occasional DM piece and some boy’s own corporate hospitality. It’s a predominantly male audience so we tend to take customers on golf days, to rugby games or sailing events. There we try to get to know them better; it’s about building relationships learning how they tick outside of business.
Case studies and client testimonials are his marketing weapons of choice and the desired effect is to inspire trust in the brand. He’s not looking to strike awe or be revered and the best way to achieve that is by talking straight dispensing with the sound and fury of techy speak. Another reason for encouraging his sales force to resist shrouding every sentence in jargon is that while the CTOs and IT managers will understand, the CEO will be left baffled. He says, it needs to be related simply because as times goes by we will be getting close to other business leads such as marketing and HR.
The focus is on the customer and his issues and delivering solutions that can fix the business problem instead of going in there with a technical message. This approach is reflected on the company’s website where you can search for information according to business issues or the industry you’re in. And while the website is well above par, Amoroso is sceptical when it comes to e-marketing. We use it cautiously. I get fed up of emails clogging up my inbox. You’ve got to use it sparingly and adapt the message so that it’s relevant to their industry.
Amoroso, in his way of dealing with almost consecutive rebrands, displayed a resilience that’s necessary in this fickle economic climate where survival of the fittest is as much applicable to companies as it is to the people within them. He detached from the brand he helped create (twice) and then without further ado became utterly consumed with another.
But Amoroso is not one to complain. The opposite actually. This is an interesting time in the market and an interesting time for Affiniti. There’s the challenge of establishing the brand and exploiting the technology. I want to be part of that.
A lifelong Chelsea fan he’s accustomed to being patient, always trusting that the magic would happen one day. At Stamford Bridge it did. And should the Affiniti brand achieve the same stupendous success as the famous CFC, chairman Roman Abramovich and his millions will have nothing to do with it.
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