The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has expanded rapidly over the past three years, growing from a £2bn business in 2021 to one worth £8bn today. This was driven by acquisitions, one of the largest was LSEG’s purchase of financial market data provider Refinitiv for £29bn in 2021. As a result, the business realised it needed to re-define and strengthen its brand identity.

With so many acquisitions LSEG “became a completely new business”, explained CMO Amie Stankiste, talking at the IAA B2B Brand Summit in London yesterday (17 October). She explained that the position of the brand was confusing for both internal and external stakeholders due to the number of brands under the group and misconceptions about the make-up of the business.

Externally, many customers thought it was just the London Stock Exchange. But Stankiste explained this part of the business only brings in 3% of the group’s revenue so it is a very small part of the company. She added that senior leaders would often have to spend the first half of stakeholder meetings explaining the composition of the group.

Internally, there was also a lack of unity and cohesion between the different brands. With over 25,000 employees, she said many questioned what the overall identity was.

Stankiste joined the company as CMO two years ago at the start of its brand evolution journey and explained her “challenge was how to take a plethora of over 20 different brands that looked and felt very different and simplify the story”.

You can’t scale when you have that many brands telling different stories.

Amie Stankiste, LSEG

She explained the first part of the rebrand was to “simplify the story, the narrative and the positioning for everyone”. This took the form of rebuilding the brand architecture and ensuring LSEG was a “powerful parent brand” with six sub-brands beneath it that represented the specialist areas that added the most value to customers.

She added that once the simplified architecture was agreed by the C-suite, the next step was to rebrand the entire organisation. “That was thousands of touch points across everything you can imagine from sales materials to marketing materials, every product interface and every operational document,” she explained.

Stankiste said that gaining internal buy-in was relatively straightforward as the clear confusion from customers and stakeholders meant there was an obvious practical need for change.

She added that the questions of efficiency and scalability also made the conversation easier. “How can you maintain and grow over 20 different brands?” she asked. “You can’t scale when you have that many brands telling completely different stories.”

Going to market

After the brand architecture was established, LSEG had to decide how to take its new brand to market. Stankiste said: “It’s a funny acronym and people don’t know how to pronounce it so we really wanted to help people pronounce the brand name and dispel myths like we are only the London Stock Exchange or we’re just present in London – we work in over 170 countries across the world.”

The team worked with the advertising agency Droga 5 on the campaign and deliberately “took some risks”. Stankiste explained the aim was to inject personality, warmth and humour because it wanted to present something “non-traditional” in terms of the industry and how the brand is seen in the market. 

She added that humour in a global campaign can be incredibly risky because various cultures can understand jokes differently so the team had to test and learn, as well as keep the internal senior team close and on board with the creative. 

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The final ad featured the brand name heavily while joking about the number of things the brand could have been called, including an incredibly long and complicated name. She explained that the adverts were built to be as “simple and impactful as possible” with clear messaging that could be easily translated into different languages.

If there was one thing Stankiste could have done differently, she explained the whole process kicked off three weeks into her starting the role and the company was still hiring for a head of brand. In an ideal world, she said she would have assembled the full team around the table from day one, adding “We got it done, but it was incredibly crunchy in those first few months because we were kind of catching up with ourselves”.

Global town hall

When the campaign launched externally, LSEG combined it with an internal “super-stream” event in a global town hall for all 25,000 employees. “Everyone tuned in,” Stankiste explained, “we had leaders in different centres around the world coming to the camera from different locations and we also launched our new internal values as well.”

She added: “I was sitting in the London office when we played the campaign video for the first time and it was probably one of the most nerve-wracking moments of my life, but thankfully everyone applauded.” She also explained that the team encouraged employees to take photographs with the campaign around the world as they saw it on taxis, buses, tubes and billboards.

The sense of pride people felt was “really tangible”, she said, and “at last you could feel that people felt they belonged to LSEG”. She added: “People would come up to me and say ‘thank you – my friends and family now know about the sort of work I do’.”

“It was a joy to be part of the culture at that moment because you could feel the shift.”