Taking over Dentsu’s think tank and renaming the company (2023)

A ¥150bn company adopting the sign of twenty-five people

The think tank taken over was an organisation of roughly twenty-five people, part-timers included. A company with revenue around ¥140bn adopted those twenty-five people’s name as its own. It is not an integration that can be explained by its contribution to profit; it amounts to changing the sign over the entrance in order to change where orders come in. Systems development is work you are called into after the specification has been decided, and how much you can charge depends on whether you can join the discussion before that. Placing recommendation, design and implementation in a single company can be seen as an attempt to reposition the firm at the top of that sequence.

That the name was taken from the parent group itself, however, gives this decision another meaning. A company that spoke at its 2000 listing of how the image of being a Dentsu subsidiary had run ahead of it took on, twenty-four years later, the name of Dentsu’s research institute. And two years after the change of name, the parent is considering a plan to place the remaining shares of just under 40% with Fujitsu or a trading house. The name Dentsu Soken, obtained by discarding the abbreviation ISID, is for now both a sign advertising social research and a nameplate indicating where the capital sits.