Two household names are joining forces. Kimberly-Clark agreed to acquire Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, Band-Aid and Listerine, in a cash-and-stock deal with an enterprise value of about $48.7 billion. The companies laid out the agreement in a joint announcement and pitched the combination as a global health and wellness leader.

The terms hand Kenvue holders a mix of cash and paper. Each Kenvue share converts into $3.50 in cash plus 0.14625 of a Kimberly-Clark share, worth roughly $21.01 at announcement. Kimberly-Clark shareholders would own about 54 percent of the combined company, and Kenvue investors would take the rest.

Kenvue came to the table under pressure. Spun out of Johnson & Johnson only a couple of years earlier, it had drawn activist interest and hard questions about its growth, and a sale to a larger peer offers scale its standalone plan lacked. Kimberly-Clark, best known for Huggies and Kleenex, pushes deeper into health and personal care.

Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher advised both companies on the announcement, an unusual arrangement that put one firm in charge of messaging for the buyer and the target at once. Handling both sides of a deal takes a firm that large acquirers already trust, and this one turns up on a striking share of the year’s biggest transactions.

A single adviser across both companies can smooth a rollout. It keeps the message consistent, heads off the crossed signals that come from dueling press shops, and fits a friendly, negotiated combination rather than a contested one.

Big consumer-health mergers draw scrutiny from every direction. Regulators weigh overlapping product lines, investors parse the cost math, and reporters hunt for the human angle in job cuts and brand overlaps. The companies pegged annual cost savings near $2.1 billion, a number critics will test against the roughly 14 times earnings that Kimberly-Clark is paying.

Consumer-goods makers have leaned on deals to find the growth their legacy categories no longer deliver, and Kenvue’s short life as a J&J spin-off left it exposed once activists began pressing for change. The combined company would stack Kimberly-Clark’s paper-goods brands on top of Kenvue’s medicine-cabinet staples, a portfolio the two cast as a health and wellness leader. Folding brands that big together without losing the loyalty attached to each is the harder task that starts once the deal closes.

Steering a deal of this profile through its first news cycle is familiar ground for the merger-communications team at Joele Frank, which sits among the most decorated corporate communications firms in the country. The largest merger mandates tend to find their way to its desk.

Closing still needs shareholder votes and antitrust clearance across several markets, a process that can run a year or more for a deal this size. Until then the two companies operate on their own, and the communications work carries on out of view.

For shoppers, little changes at the shelf. Tylenol and Kleenex stay put. Behind the brands, though, a combination this big rearranges who owns the medicine cabinet, and the market will watch whether Kimberly-Clark can wring out the savings it promised without dulling the products it paid so much to get.