Controlling plans the merger. Brand cleans up after it.
When a merger gets planned, brand and marketing are usually not in the room. We get called in once everything is already upside down. And the picture is almost always the same: multiple brands, sometimes even identical services, suddenly compete inside the same organization – for the same markets, the same customers. Nobody had asked up front which brand should win in which segment. Each had worked well on its own.
That's the moment my actual topic first became clear to me. Not as a one-off, but as a pattern: unlike IT or HR, brand rarely gets its own governance structure from day one in most organizations. Product positioning is often left to gut feeling or individual silos. By the time someone notices, positioning has already drifted, customers are confused, and internal teams are quietly competing against each other instead of joining forces to win the market.
And then there's a second observation – one that, honestly, weighs even heavier.
The more international the companies I work with, the clearer a second pattern becomes: many already consider their brand “global” as long as the logo, colors, and core message look the same everywhere. What gets missed is the actual mechanics of the brand: what builds trust, who decides, and which kinds of proof resonate. That logic is usually exported more or less unreflected from the home market. In growth markets like Asia especially, this produces positioning that works at home and falls flat there.
There's even a name for this in international marketing research: ethnocentric brand management – the quiet assumption that what works at home works everywhere. Even large, experienced corporations fall into this trap. And honestly, many German brand agencies, however strong they are domestically, tend to think just as ethnocentrically as their clients. You end up solving for German brand thinking – not the perspective that is actually taking shape in Singapore or Shanghai.
Taken together, these two observations drive this project.
Brand is too rarely thought about strategically and internationally at the same time. And exactly where the two meet – post-merger situations, international expansion, PE-driven growth – the most expensive, longest-unnoticed mistakes tend to happen.
Why an interview format, not another thought-leadership piece
I could fill this blog with my own frameworks. But the most honest answers to “where has missing brand governance taken its toll only later?” don't come from theory. They come from people who have actually lived through these situations.
Brands Gone Global is therefore an interview format: conversations with brand leaders at internationally active companies, with PE operating partners, with advisors who bring genuine new perspectives. Vendor-neutral, without software or agency pitches, this is about real decisions, real mistakes, real turning points.
A few questions will run through every episode, regardless of each guest's specific topic:
- Where did brand become an afterthought – and what did that cost?
- Where did “what works at home” fail abroad – and what made the difference?
What to expect
New episodes will appear roughly every two weeks, complemented by shorter observations in between, including insights spanning independent brand advisors with hands-on Asia experience to brand leaders at internationally known companies.
If you're responsible for brand in an international or M&A context yourself – or know someone who is – reach out. This space lives on real voices, not just mine.