01/10/2026
Hi Facebook! 👋 I’m excited to be taking over Exclaimer’s account today.
My name is Kate, Founder of House of Comms, a strategic marketing consultancy that embraces the power of movement in nature to find the right path forwards.
Here’s a random fact for you: the Pennine Way is 268 miles long, roughly the distance from London to Newcastle. I walked the whole thing solo three years ago and the rest, as they say, is history... 🫠
What's that got to do with brand identity? Absolutely nothing. Except that walk changed my career in brand.
At the time, I had just celebrated ten years in market research – 6 leading a UK brand and 4 navigating a post-acquisition world where 10 consumer insight agencies rebranded into one entity across 23 locations globally. In comparison, that 268-mile walk was a doddle!
That M&A / rebrand experience took everything out of me. Somewhere out on the trail, I realised I didn't want to spend the rest of my career sitting at a laptop five days a week, so I came home, left the corporate world, and set up my own consultancy. I've since trained as a Hill & Moorland Leader and started a multi-day hiking business called Where She Walks, inspired by my Pennine Way experience.
Here's what nobody tells you about a rebrand or M&A, though: the brand strategy gets signed off weeks before the operational reality catches up. Client decks go out with the wrong logo. Boilerplates read like novels. Brand names change but legal entities stay the same. Marketing and IT are working from different spreadsheets. And the channel carrying the most risk and least appeal, usually email, is often overlooked.
In hindsight, there's plenty that can be improved.
On 15th October, I'm joining Elisabeth Goossens and James Wayne from Exclaimer, to discuss exactly this: managing brand identity through rebrands and M&A, from people who've lived it on every side of the table.
Register for the webinar here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0ywQzp0
Hope to see you there!