If anybody knows that rebranding is a huge undertaking – it’s us. Before you get to the best part (new colors, logos, web design, and all the exciting creative pieces in between), it’s important that your rebranding initiative is grounded in strong strategy. When fleshing out your process for rebranding, here are our top 5 things to consider:
1. Assessing your existing brand value:
Even if it’s time for a change, chances are your existing brand still holds some power. To help guide your rebranding strategy, take a step back and look at what’s being said about the company in the media, online, and in blogs. The existing conversation will help you understand your current brand value and make decisions about how much of that brand you want to keep and how much you want to refresh. A branding agency can also help you aggregate and assess this information — which is especially important if you want to put a monetary value around your old company assets or are considering going public in the near future. This assessment will help you understand what worked, what didn’t, and what elements of your current brand you want to protect.
2. Get to the “why” of rebranding:
What customer or market insights are driving this change? If you are rebranding due to a string of bad press, your strategic approach should be radically different than if you are rebranding because you are acquiring new, exciting assets. If these changes are sensitive in nature, partnering with a branding agency may be your best bet to understand how to reach out to the market and drive positive results. If you’re simply adapting to a changing customer demographic, you may have it slightly easier but still need to get ruthlessly specific with your internal team about what’s motivating this change so they can get fired up behind the company’s new goals. This “why” will serve as a compass for all future decisions, employee questions, and forks in the road. If in doubt during the rebranding experience, simply ask yourself how that choice ladders up to your “why.”
3. Defining what makes your rebranding different:
One of the most important steps in the process for rebranding a company is identifying competitive differentiators. What makes you, you? In many ways, rebranding a company is very similar to starting a new company or beginning a fresh entrepreneurial project. Your audience will need to understand your unique value proposition, what sets you apart from your competitor, and how you’re making your customers’ lives better. If you’re rebranding, you’ve probably already begun to anticipate a new customer need that they may not even realize yet, so don’t fall prey to the temptation of being a generalist. Sing those differentiators loud and proud and get specific about what customer needs you’re satisfying. In short, rebranding is a lot more than just a new name and logo. It fundamentally captures something new you hope to bring to the market – and getting clear on what that “something” is will help catapult the project to success.
4. Establish what success looks like:
Speaking of success, you need to understand what that looks like for your company. Is it an increase in sales? A new customer base? A bigger share of the competitive wallet? Before you begin a rebranding project, determine how much time, money, energy, and resources you’re willing to allocate to the initiative and what you expect in return. Having clear milestones and measurable goals will level set expectations and set the new brand up for success. This also serves as a system of checks and balances to ensure you are on track with your targeted process for rebranding a company.
5. Executing your rebranding strategy:
After all of that’s finished, it’s time to execute your rebranding strategy. That includes communicating to existing customers about the brand change and capturing the attention of new customers who are about to discover your organization. A branding agency is the quickest and most effective way to understand how to talk to these two very distinct audiences and what tools will be most beneficial in driving change. While you’re promoting the new brand identity, you also need to be reeducating existing clients about why the change occurred and how they still fit into your company ecosystem. This is a delicate – but important – balance.
You’ll notice that we intentionally left out detailing the creative development stages from our rebranding check list. That isn’t to say that we don’t think this step is important (after all, you can’t rebrand without those elements), but rather that it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of new creative or packaging and lose sight of the strategic insight driving your changes. A rebrand is the perfect time to hit the pause button on your business and make meaningful, lasting change that you can’t do when you’re wholly focused on the day-to-day.
Well, what are you waiting for? Contact us today and together, we’ll transform your brand.
