Going public with Private Equity

Come on in. The water's lovely.

The water's lovely, but you may be surprised to learn it's lonely in here.

Here is the only dedicated advisory firm selling brand and marketing value creation to Private Equity - staffed by real CMOs and people who are practitioners not consultants - using tools and IP drawn from real-world projects. 

In our research we came across businesses who sell slices of the pie (branding, digital marketing, search, websites) and a good number of consultancies who claim marketing authority but are run by career consultants. 

We have even found some interesting businesses that sell marketing and branding into PE houses themselves for their own purposes, but they tend to eschew work with portfolio companies. 

So why would an industry that has around £30 billion of investments in the UK, and could have as much as an astonishing $3.4 trillion invested in the US, be so under-served? 

Our experience over the last seven years leads us to believe there are a two solid reasons behind this. Solid but unsustainable. 

Firstly, brand and marketing have been notoriously elusive - slippery even - when it comes to being codified and accountable for value creation. The old image of marketing types sloping around the bars of Soho is as unfashionable as powdered egg. These days everything in marketing is measurable, predictable, demonstrable.  

The road from under-performing to high-performing in brand and marketing is well mapped if not yet sufficiently well-travelled.  

More work must be done to explode the myths of marketing, and the PE community have been uncharacteristically incurious about what's working and what's not.

Forgiving them their blushes but people like Alistair Brew at BGF, Valerie Kendall at WestBridge and Roux Brits at YFM are challenging this approach with an intelligent insistence that that brand and marketing can drive value creation as much as any of the other aspects of business turnaround.

So here is our first call to arms: members of the Private Equity community… rise up and demand the same degree of accountability from your brand and marketing turnarounds as you do from finance, HR and even from sales.  

There is nothing special about brand and marketing value creation, it's just done a better job of hiding from the cold light of day than other disciplines. 

That said, we are not dumping the blame entirely on the demand side. The second limiting factor is how the supply side has resisted the changes that were needed for so long now.

When we look back in a decade or so, we'll come to view the marketing services industry as an historical anomaly. One that organised itself into a long and convoluted accordion-shaped form, with each specialism focusing on their own particular slice. The purpose of each business was to serve and maintain that silo, using a time-based process as the denominator.

New thinking and a collapse of the media/production cost relationship has started to erode that entire stack, and the streets of London and New York are now alive to the sound of collapsing value chains.

When it comes to AI-led disruption of brand and marketing, the music is stopping for the industry and there are only about three chairs. 

We are betting that one of those will be marked Brand and marketing value creation for Private Equity and portfolio companies. 

If you work in Private Equity or are in the management team of a PE-owned portfolio company, you’ll know where to find us.