Business brand name change after acquisition?

searcher profile

January 19, 2026

by a searcher in Boston, MA, USA

The seller is offering the B2C/consumer part of their business for sale, and keeping the B2B part of it. They want to keep the brand name, suggesting the buyer should create a new one. The problem is the consumer part of the business for sale has a lot of great customer reviews published on google that will be lost as a result. My intuition is that the brand is more important fo the B2C business and want to negotiate that I keep it and they take a new one. What do you think? How hard should I push on this, assuming everything else works well in the deal? Any experiences where you got hurt by changing the consumer brand name after the acquisition?
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Reply by a searcher
from University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada
it might depend on the business, but the core value of what you are buying is the goodwill, which is the brand. If you don't get that you might as well start your own business from scratch. I would also highlight the challenge of separating the B2B and B2C. sounds like it could get messy.
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Reply by a professional
from University of Rhode Island in Portland, OR, USA
You want the full brand. Hence, push pretty hard, else you may well be directly competing against the seller in the very near future. While it might not be competition on the level of going for the exact same customers, expect things like overlapping on SEO, driving each other's ad costs up, etc.
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