How Sepracor's Pointless Name Change May Minimize Internal Conflict
Sepracor, the company best known for its sleeping pill Lunesta, will change its name to "Sunovion," a move that will only increase confusion over the name of this important but obscure company. To be clear, the name of this company -- which also makes the Omnaris nasal allergy spray -- is completely irrelevant to its business. Doctors and patients mostly don't care who makes medicines, they're only interested in whether they work. So why would Sepracor bother to tie itself in knots over an elaborate and expensive corporate rebranding?
Just to get you all caught up: Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma bought Sepracor in 2009 using a legal entity named Aptiom, so now Sepracor is called Sunovion. Got that? (BNET predicted this would happen in March.)
There's undoubtedly a PowerPoint deck floating around Sunovion/Sepracor's Marlborough, Mass., HQ that makes sense of this. From the outside observer's point of view, however, it suggests that DSP is afraid of the type of low-grade culture war that merged companies often go through in which survivors of one regime (Sepracor) resist and stymie their colleagues in the other (DSP). You can see there's already a "debate" about whether this is a good idea on CafePharma.
If you've ever worked for a company that's the product of a merger you'll be familiar with the experience of hearing older colleagues wax nostalgic for the days of the previous management. Sometimes two workers from opposite sides of the merger will argue over the way "we" do things at the new company.
Usually, as time goes by, these things work themselves out. But sometimes they can lead to destructive civil wars that can wreak havoc, as employees literally take sides against each other. This happened during Pfizer (PFE)'s takeover of Pharmacia in 2002. Pharmacia had a relaxed, college campus-style HQ in suburban Peapack, N.J. Employees had perks like a dry cleaner and a post office; gourmet sandwiches and Mexican food were served in a spacious cafeteria. Pfizer, by contrast, is headquartered in a giant tower on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The two places couldn't feel more different.
In his book The Whistleblower, former Pharmacia vp Peter Rost describes what happened when Pfizer took over. Initially, the Pharmacia execs were enthusiastic to teach their new bosses about Pharmacia's businesses. But the days soon turned into an endless series of (you guessed it) PowerPoint shows as Pfizer demanded more and more information about the company it had bought, making the Pharmacia folk increasingly anxious about their future. Rost writes:
A third meeting took place when one of Pfizer's HR people, dressed in a red leather skirt, visited Pharmacia. Apparently, she had worked as a lawyer in a prior life, and she came off as fairly arrogant to the assembled Pharmacia crowd. When pressed with more and more pointed questions, she yelled to the packed room, "You should realize that it is Pfizer taking over you and not the other way around."Giving Sepracor a third, neutral name makes both Sepracor's employees and their new managers from DSP part of an ostensibly "new" company. It obscures who took over whom. Thus "Sunovion" may have more value internally than externally.
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