Altitude Training: Consolidating Companies in Market Research

Welcome back to The Cint Bulletin! A bi-weekly newsletter feeding the world’s curiosity - delivered to your LinkedIn inbox personally by Cint CEO Giles Palmer.

Today’s edition will be all around Consolidating Companies in Market Research.?

The topic of Market Research mergers is something I’m personally passionate about because it is my lived experience.?

I stepped into the role of Cint CEO in April 2023, about 15 months after Cint and Lucid came together. And, just before that, Cint had acquired GapFish and P2 Sample. So, there were four different companies - two big ones and two smaller ones - with four different platforms, four different sets of tech, and four different sets of people.

The job I had - and still have - is to bring these things together and create a new coherent organization which is a blend of the best of all that it was built from, and also is forward thinking and innovative. It’s about making active choices: We’re going to be this, and not that.?

Looking beyond Cint

While we’ll be discussing some specifics about what this looks like here at Cint - and my experience navigating through it - the conversation around mergers in market research isn’t a conversation unique to us.

There’s an old Lucid graphic that lays out all the companies in the market research ecosystem from circa six years ago or so, and when you compare that to a new version you can see how many companies have merged, rebranded, or pivoted where they sit in the industry.?

(Not to mention how many other new companies have popped up in the landscape.)

There’s a lot of you out there who are going through - or have recently gone through - a similar journey to what we’re going through now.

Combining Cultures: Which set of Slack emojis do we use??

One of the biggest challenges when you bring two companies together is that it is a change for everybody involved. You suddenly have different colleagues, maybe a different boss. You've got a different product to sell to different customers. In many cases - ours included - the company that you were competing against avidly for years - your sort of nemesis - is suddenly sitting next to you and you’re on the same team.

It’s an enormous amount of change, which can be very traumatic and overwhelming.?

And there’s a lot of complexity to bringing everyone together.

There are so many corporate habits that have been built up over years and years and years, and letting go of those habits in order to step into new ones is hard. It's an active choice, and it even gets down to some basic, almost territorial stuff.

In my previous life, I brought two companies together and one company called company-wide meetings “all hands” and the other one called them “town halls”. So a decision had to be made as to what terminology to use. It sounds simple - just pick one - but if you call it an “all hands”, then some people are like “oh, yeah, we know what that is” and the others are like “um, do you mean a town hall?”?

Another example is when we brought Slack together into one instance, we ended up having to make an active decision of which set of emojis to choose and which set which set of channels to choose.

We had a “Kudos” channel in one company and a “Thank You” channel at the other. And you don’t need both, but they’re not quite the same. The Kudos channel was a big deal: Everybody took a lot of pride in giving their colleagues kudos. But, that was not part of the culture of the other organization, which led to a feeling of “well that’s yours, not ours.

These differences are seemingly small, but they can persist to give this sense of us vs them.?

I’ve found that people in a new company that's come together often still describe themselves as I'm ex this or I'm ex that.?

When I joined Cint, if I met somebody who would say, “I'm ex-blah blah blah”, I’d say, “We need to stop saying that. We are new. We are all the new Cint.”

But I acknowledge that for the Cint people who didn't have to change their name, that's easier.

For the Lucid people who were attached to that name, and it meant a lot to them, and they had a history and legacy with it, saying “you have got to stop calling yourself that” before they're ready can cause a negative reaction.?

My advice is to allow the dust to settle and allow people to process things in their own time, in their own way, whilst providing vision and clarity about something that they might want to opt into. Paint an imaginative desirable future that people want to jump into, want to be part of, and then they'll be more comfortable to say “okay, that's that chapter in the past; we're opening a new chapter now, and I'm opting into this.”

Giving somebody something to opt into is a powerful thing to do.

I won’t sugarcoat it: Going through mergers and acquisitions can be stressful and messy.?

Not everyone will choose to opt in to riding that wave.?

Some people will say this is just not for me. This is not what it was before. This change is not what I want to subscribe to. I didn't ask for this. This has been done to me. So, those people will opt out.

Some people are also simply more comfortable with change and stress than others.?

Some people thrive in it - I remember reading study, saying that stress is bad; but boredom's even worse. That’s more of the philosophy I buy into.?

Regardless, over time, the half life of stress kicks in and everything settles back down to sort of a normal working pattern on the cultural side; without the overwhelming sense of everything's been changed.?

Combining Tech: They look the same, they act the same… but they’re not built the same

When you have technology that's been built up over 10 years to be competitive with another technology and then you’re given the job to merge or integrate them, the complexity is crazy.?

Even though they look kind of the same and they do kind of the same job; they're designed completely differently, built by different people, and using different technology stacks.

What we’ve done at Cint is take the bones of one of the technologies and then built in the functionality of the other, and then redone the entire user experience based on combined learnings over the last decade.

And that is a very, very tough task.?

There are so many moving parts.?

These technologies were not designed to work together.?

For example, Cint had a rate card and Lucid is a reverse auction marketplace. Putting a rate card and reverse option side by side is a big piece of development.?

And then deprecating all of the old systems and making sure, if you turn something off, you know all of the implications.?

It requires a level of detail of knowing every single bit of how the system works so you understand that if you change something over here, it can have an impact over there, and know what to do about that.?

Not to mention the equally tough task of then migrating thousands of customers from one system to the other, while also ensuring a stable customer experience for everyone sitting across both marketplaces.?

We have to make sure our customer experience on the new platform is as good, if not better. Their pricing isn't affected. The timing isn't affected. Their quality isn’t affected. That all the billing works seamlessly, because it all plugs into backend systems which are all automated.

This is why - for anyone wondering - it’s taken so long to roll out the new Cint Exchange. We’re not intentionally moving slow; but, we've intentionally decided not to rush it, because if we rush it and screw it up, we're messing with people's businesses, and we have a lot of customers that rely on us. We are taking this task very, very seriously.?

We’re currently in the testing phase of the new platform so we can make sure we are giving our customers the experience they want. We want to build that experience together.

The same concept of giving employees something that they can look forward to as opposed to being stuck in what they have applies just as much to customers: We want everyone to be on board and excited for the ride!?

Some Advice: Do the altitude training before trying to climb the mountain

If you’re about to embark on a merger or acquisition of your own:?

Get lots of rest.

Take a holiday.

And be prepared for a two-plus year journey.

These things do not happen quickly.?

But, if you don't take time initially for the big decisions around integrating and deprecating old systems, moving customers onto a single stack, building back-end systems which are integrated and automated; you end up having stress and friction in the organization for years to come.

Even if the disruption will be smaller at the beginning, it will just get worse and worse, and all of the best people will end up getting very frustrated and leave.?

Whereas, if you take the pain early - even if it's significant - and do the integration right building really great backend systems and taking your customers along with you on the journey; once you're through it in a couple of years, you’ll enter a new phase of the company all around innovating on a brand new, fresh platform with huge potential.

I’ve said internally: We’re altitude training. We're like a team that is trekking through the Himalayas. Right now we're struggling for breath and we're working our asses off. But when we get over the mountains and down the other side, we will be unbelievably fit and have achieved an incredible amount.?

Do the training. Keep going. And you’ll come out the other side stronger than before.

Until next time,

- Giles