Exit through the brand shop

Most brand strategy conversations start with the usual questions: Who are you, and who are you for? Not many of them ever get to, “Who wants to buy this company?”

That’s not a cynical question, exactly. Even though it gestures lightly at the bittersweet ratio at which independent brands undergo acquisition and those deeply held homegrown convictions get subsumed into a corporate blob.

The independent brand, in many cases, is destined to become a line item in someone else’s portfolio. And it largely depends on the nature of the founder, and the nature of the business, as to whether one of the choices they get to make is to stay independent forever. Maybe it was never the plan, maybe things shifted and more exciting ventures are drawing investment and attention. Or maybe for the business to reach its full potential, it needs backing an individual founder just can’t supply.

Because acquisition is one of those stages that signal “We made it, baby.” And yet, a lot of brands with notable traction still aren’t buyable.

A brand can have a positive trendline and a valid consumer insight and still lack the supply chain, the channel relationships or the marketing muscle to belong in someone else’s portfolio. The things that inspire an audience to love and adopt a brand are not necessarily the things that inspire confidence when it’s time for the founder to pass the baton. CPG leaders are increasingly optimizing for coherence over breadth, taking on fewer “fringe” brands and prioritizing those that clearly know where they fit and where they can win. PwC

The next generation of CPG winners won’t be built through aggregation but through curation. They will own a more intentional brand portfolio and execute with greater speed, purpose, and adaptability.

— PwC

Some of that gap is logistical, the kind of stuff a broker or ops consultant sorts out. But a surprising amount of it is brand work that had been hiding in plain sight from the drop.

Take story consistency, for instance. Lots of founders can tell you what their brand means in casual conversation, and with real conviction. But the thing that means the story survives transition, or the story becomes equitable, is that it can be transferred to someone else with reliable repeatability. AKA. It’s documented. It’s part of the business structure, not just a sticky note on someone’s desk.

Then there’s the work that looks like marketing but is really infrastructure: Is brand loyalty tied to an actual process like a repeatable unboxing moment or a reason for the customer to return that isn’t a new product launch that got cooked up because sales went flat?

Buyers price against brand equity, channel proof and EBITDA quality. And two of those are brand strategy questions long before they turn up in profit and loss statements. “Inconsistent brand voice” is never a line item on a cap table, but it shows up everywhere else: leaky loyalty, weak vendor relationships, over-reliance on a single marketplace or retailer, e-commerce penetration. All of this is backstopped by brand. Lyndon Advisory

The boring-but-deadly stuff counts, too. Do you actually hold a registered trademark, or just a claimed ™ that was never formalized? Is your product’s front-of-pack claim something you can substantiate, or something you just really believe in? Food Dive

Even your packaging files matter more than people assume. Every label is a high-stakes face-off between marketing, which naturally wants the most desirable claim, and legal, which naturally wants the most defensible. And only one of them is going to get the final say. GlobalVision

None of this shows up in a pitch deck. All of it shows up in due diligence.

The brands that get bought at a premium — think Poppi, Simple Mills, Dr. Squatch, Wild, Power Crunch — didn’t merely have good instincts. At some point, someone showed up with receipts.

So: How can you tell if you’ve got a sellable brand on your hands?

I put together a short audit to help figure that out — seven areas of brand acquirability buyers are likely to weigh against potential purchase. If you want it, just reply to this post and I’ll send it to you.