Mary Say, CEO at Brand Potential, and Julian Bambridge, CEO at pet food business MPM Products, discuss how the brand agency has helped MPM along its PE ownership journey.

How did Brand Potential and MPM come to work together?

Mary Say: We are a brand agency and we’ve found a way to wrap up our research, strategy and creative services and apply them to the world of private equity, either as part of a due diligence process, or during the growth phase. We have done both with the MPM investment. MPM is a natural pet food consumer business; we’ve worked with them since ECI first acquired them in 2016, and through two rounds of private equity investment.

Julian Bambridge: I’ve been the CEO of MPM for 13 years, back when revenues amounted to £2.5m. By year-end 2022, we’ll be doing £160m. We’re a classic entrepreneurial business - the original founders brought in a management team to elevate the idea of natural pet food to the next level and take advantage of the strengths we have in our product, the emerging brands, and the premiumisation of pet food. In wanting to de-risk, the founders looked to PE ownership. ECI allowed us to professionalise, which began the discussions with Brand Potential.

It’s incredibly important to get the brand story right. As an outsider, Brand Potential was able to ask cornerstone questions, to make us question our thinking.

What does the work of Brand Potential entail, and how do you support both private equity investors and their portfolio companies?

Say: Our involvement with MPM came about pre-ECI acquisition. We’ve worked with ECI across a number of investments. As a specialist in consumers and brands, it came naturally that they asked us to onboard alongside all their conventional due diligence to do a piece of consumer and brand DD on the business.

Post-acquisition, ECI asked us to follow through with those findings, and go through a process of brand and portfolio planning. MPM has two brands, and it was clear they needed to be positioned differently, by target audience and by channel. We carried out research with consumers across both channels and in key international markets to understand different motivations around pet ownership, feeding regimes, shopper decisions and so on.  We were able to identify how to position each brand, how to tell the story, and what that meant for range architecture, creative execution and future innovation; and the story for trade customers.

How did Brand Potential play a role in supporting and accelerating the growth during the PE journey so far, both organically and through the M&A process?

Say: We’re a project-based business, so the PE house will bring us in to do the DD, but when the deal is done, the relationship switches to work with the management team. We understand the investment hypothesis and what the PE firm is aiming to build.
In the first couple of years of working with MPM, there was quite a lot of stitching together to be done, so we had an ongoing advisory relationship.

Bambridge: They look at us more structurally, rather than as an in-and-out project. The projects can then get done in the right order so the business can continue to build value while underlying improvements are being made.  They provided us with some key building blocks, such as having real clarity on our shoppers, so we could focus on our trade relationships while we continued to work through the brand stories.

Julian, did you feel as though the support from Brand Potential put MPM in a stronger position when changing hands from ECI to 3i?

Bambridge: The anxiety for us was how to spend the investment money, and who should support our doing so. The real value for us is finding someone like Mary and Brand Potential to help identify our brand story, and then how best to articulate that into a proposition.

I can now have a section in our IM linking all our strong consumer KPIs to the changes we’ve made, with evidence of brand awareness and resonance, shopper behaviour, all the way through to specifics such as click-through and repeat rates. If you build that brand profile, invest in it and then stretch and test it, it adds a massive amount of value.

As a result, with the new 3i investment, we’re looking to expand internationally. The brand story behind one brand in the UK versus the US is quite different. Brand Potential has supported us in re-telling that story, and identifying the differences in the consumer in different geographies.

We’ve also noticed a shift in our consumer dynamic during the last few years. We’re looking at the sub-30 age group, looking to have a pet before committing to children, so people who’d prefer to have pets to children altogether. The brand messaging has to change to accommodate that.

Say: MPM is a classic business growth story, from founder start-up to small, entrepreneurial first-stage investment. The second wave was from national to international, and now it’s on the cusp of global, branded business. We’ve really loved helping the team at MPM to go on that journey.