Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest again today is Troy Pike, CEO of Parker School Uniforms. So, Troy, welcome back to Brandonomics.

Troy: Hi, Robin.

Robin: I want to talk to you today about acquisitions and the challenges around that. So obviously you’ve made some along the way. Tell me a little bit about, from your perspective, how you deal with the brand equity of these companies that you’re acquiring when you’re really looking at that.

Troy: It’s a really tough challenge for us because these companies – we’ve grown more than 50-percent in the past few years, and each of the companies we’ve acquired has been in business more than 30 years, and so they have built a lot of brand equity in their market. Our challenge is to not throw that away, but to build on it.

Robin: So when you’re thinking about building on that what are you doing first to make sure that their brand equity stays and you’re not destroying that, and secondly, that it has a great relationship to the Parker brand?

Troy: So what we’re trying to do is actually build their brand, update their brands in many cases in terms of its look and feel and presence in the market and feed in the Parker apparel brands into those stores so that there’s a constant, which is the store that the people are going to, but we’re introducing something new without taking anything away.

Robin: That’s wonderful. So you can keep that brand, but kind of start introducing the benefits of the Parker brand too.

Troy: Exactly.

Robin: Wonderful. Well thank you so much for sharing that, Troy. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.