The Old Name Kept Winning

The situation

A Fortune 100 industrial manufacturer had closed a multibillion-dollar acquisition two years earlier. The acquired company's websites, domains, and global vendor contracts still had not moved to the parent's domain.

In 2018, before I owned any of it, I ran a search analysis for the division. The finding was simple and uncomfortable: customers still searched for the acquired brand's name far more than the new one. The parent's brand terms had not caught on yet. Most of two key competitors' traffic came from organic search, and our own rankings for core category terms had a lot of room to grow.

The task

The analysis came with recommendations: a brand transition campaign using PR and advertising, tracking of old versus new brand terms, an always-on paid search program, image and video built for search, informational content kept separate from catalog content, and a migration plan with search built in from day one. That plan meant search console profiles for every international domain, pre- and post-migration benchmarks, backlink analysis, and a full redirect map.

That presentation is a large part of why I got the job running the division's websites. Then the job came with the migration attached. I took it over in April [CONFIRM year] with a December 31 deadline that could not move: 19 websites in 11 languages, new sites to launch, old domains to retire under each country's record retention rules, and global agency and vendor agreements to wind down. On top of that, European stakeholders had pushed back on the proposed new designs.

The action

I put the regions on a clock. Biweekly status calls with every global region, so problems surfaced in days, not quarters.

I took over the vendor relationships. Agency and vendor contracts moved under my management, so one person owned the dates that could not slip.

I rebuilt the plan around the people we already had. A new project plan, with every task that could move to an internal resource delegated there.

I turned the design debate into a test. Instead of debating the designs, I helped the European team build a design grounded in search and user experience principles, then tested it against the original designs and information architecture. That test became its own story.

The result

All 19 websites launched across Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, the US and Canada, and Asia Pacific within the nine-month window. The vendor agreements were terminated, and the old sites were backed up to meet each country's retention requirements. The A/B test was launched and set the website standard for the division’s global website strategy.

The lesson

A company can change its name in a day. Its customers take years. A migration plan that ignores what people actually type is just a redirect project. And migration is a commercial project wearing a technical costume: the constraint is almost never the platform.