DLAB Branding Atelier
A reflection on the data that is discussed in fiscal and legal terms, and that almost no one is reading in terms of identity.
Every year the data appears. In reports, in conferences, in advisory conversations: Spain is facing an unprecedented wave of generational change. By 2030, more than half a million entrepreneurs could reach retirement age. And more than 70% of those companies don't have a formalized succession plan.
The debate generated by this data is predictable: family protocols, donation taxation, partner agreements, talent management. Everything necessary. All urgent. Everything, too, oriented to the internal structure.
What is hardly discussed is what happens to the brand.
Not with the logo. With something deeper than the logo: with the identity that a company has been building over decades and that, in most cases, has never needed to be put into words because it was embodied in the person who founded it.
The brand of many family SMEs is not in a manual. It's in how the founder picks up the phone. In how they make decisions when the situation gets complicated. In the criteria with which it chooses a supplier, or in how it treats a customer who has been around for fifteen years. All of that is identity. And all that identity runs the risk of falling by the wayside if no one articulates it before it changes hands.
Here is the nuance worth emphasizing: generational change does not destroy a company's identity. He exposes it. If that identity was clear and could be named, it survives and evolves. If it only existed in the head of the one who founded it, it is slowly diluted. The company continues, customers stay, but something is lost. A criterion, a way of doing things, a sign of confidence that was difficult to explain but that everyone noticed.
The brand's job in a moment of change is not to redesign the image. It's doing something much more important and much less visible: helping the company to become something that the company has always been – but never needed to say – into something that the next one can understand, protect and continue to build.
That doesn't require a rebranding. It requires listening. Questions. Time for the company to understand itself before explaining itself to others.
And that conversation, the sooner it starts, the better.
How much of your company still depends on the founder being in the room for it to function as it should?
