How can businesses realign with their core values and stay relevant in the ever-evolving marketing trends? How can they effectively dispel negative perceptions and enhance their market share? The answer lies in a well-planned rebranding strategy.
In this article, you will learn how to rebrand a company and what it takes to develop a successful rebranding strategy. Additionally, you will understand the risks associated with the rebranding process and how to avoid them at different steps.
Whether newly established brands are looking to boost their brand identity or companies that want to change their brand strategy, this article is helpful for everyone. So, read on to find more exciting information regarding the rebranding process.
Understanding The Need for Rebranding
Rebranding a company doesn’t simply mean changing the company’s logo or website. It is a complete process that helps companies develop a new brand identity. It can be a partial rebrand aligned with a brand’s evolution to attract new audiences and revitalize current customers.
Let’s discuss the need for rebranding in detail and understand when companies consider a complete rebrand or a brand refresh.
Enhancing Brand Identity: Refining brand architecture, voice, visuals, and messaging strengthens equity by ensuring a cohesive experience that optimally positions the brand.
Embracing Technological Advancements: Adapting branding across digital and physical ensures the brand promise remains relevant to existing customers and attractive to new target markets, bolstering market share.
Taking the Business to New Locations: A visual rebrand accompanied by brand ambassadors announcing the rebrand helps communicate an expansion to attract current and new customers.
Attracting New Customers: Updating branding, especially on social media and digital marketing, appeals to new audiences while retaining loyal customers and increasing brand value.
Market Repositioning: Realigning messaging and awareness through a rebranding strategy better positions the existing brand to current market needs.
Mergers and acquisitions: A visual rebrand, along with consistent brand promise and guidelines, integrates existing and new customers into a cohesive target market.
New Brand Guidelines: Establishing an updated brand identity, personality, and assets through a successful rebranding project sets the foundation for growth.
Covering up a crisis: Altering brand elements can help distance an existing brand from past issues to regain stakeholder trust.
Negative Brand Perception: Refining marketing strategy and digital/social media assets through a rebrand shifts recognition to a more favorable position.
How To Rebrand A Company
Successful rebranding involves thorough planning and execution. Companies must assess why a rebrand is needed by asking some serious rebranding questions and developing a complete rebranding checklist. Once a company has solid reasons to rebrand, the following steps can help build and execute a successful strategy.
Conduct Market Research
Conducting thorough market research is the critical first step when rebranding a company. This process involves analyzing the brand’s current market share and position relative to competitors. Companies should audit existing brand assets to understand which are still valuable and which need refinement.
Market surveys and focus groups with customers provide insights into brand perception and how to increase brand value. Researching industry trends helps determine if a rebranding effort is necessary to capture new opportunities or prevent loss of market share.
Gathering consumer data through online questionnaires, one-on-one interviews, and observational studies allows brands to effectively align their new identity and messaging with target audiences’ wants.
Competitor analysis reveals how others are innovating to maintain relevance. All this research informs the strategy needed to maximize a rebrand’s impact on the bottom line.
Define Practical Goals
After conducting thorough market research, the next step is to define practical and achievable goals. It provides focus and measurable metrics to evaluate success. Companies should consider objectives like increasing brand loyalty, developing a recognizable brand name, or clarifying brand messaging.
Practical goals should possess specificity, realism, and time-bound attributes to provide clear direction for strategy and execution. For instance, aiming to boost customer retention by 5% within a 6-month. These goals must align with research insights and business priorities.
Companies also define targets for metrics that demonstrate the impact on finances, such as revenue or market share. Setting operational goals like finalizing a new logo or launching updated marketing materials by quarter three helps the project stay on schedule and budget.
With well-defined and relevant goals, teams can build brand strategies with integrated tactics that move the organization closer to its rebrand vision. Clear goals provide motivation and transparency throughout the process for all stakeholders.
Get Everyone On Board
Getting everyone on board is crucial for a successful rebranding process. It involves communicating the rationale, objectives, and benefits of the rebrand to critical stakeholders. Companies must decide between rebrand vs refresh based on the research findings.
Meetings allow stakeholders across departments to understand how the rebrand aligns with organizational strategy and impacts their specific areas. Presenting case studies of other successful rebrands helps gain support. The types of rebranding, like visual, structural, or strategic, must be explained depending on the scope of work.
Anticipating concerns and providing responses reassures stakeholders. Once stakeholders understand the brand refresh or rebrand will improve metrics like loyalty, sales, and market share over the long run, they will likely invest the time and resources needed. With endorsement from leadership and staff, brands can progress to the following steps, confident everyone is working towards the same vision.
Identify Unique Selling Points
Through market research and data analysis, companies must pinpoint what differentiates explicitly and elevates their brand above competitors. It involves evaluating all aspects of the business model, from product or service offerings to customer experience.
Identifying a clear value proposition helps drive brand repositioning efforts. Whether slightly modifying the logo, fully rebranding products, or restructuring business units, companies must understand the core strengths to focus the rebrand on.
Considering the risks of rebranding, like customer confusion, is also prudent. Thoroughly defining unique points of parity and advantage grounds branding decisions in reality versus assumptions. This process ensures any logo rebranding, marketing campaigns, or strategic changes underscore what is truly unique and compelling about the company.
Identifying unique selling points forms the foundation for an impactful rebrand aligned with customer needs.
Review Brand Identity
Reviewing the brand identity is integral for crafting an effective rebranding strategy. It involves auditing all elements that comprise a brand’s identity, including brand slogan, voice, awareness, logo, and brand colors. Evaluating what currently works and needs improvement based on market research illuminates where identity can be enhanced.
For example, analyzing brand awareness amongst target demographics shows which areas need increased marketing. Assessing brand voice determines if it clearly expresses the company’s personality and vision or requires adjustment. Successful rebrands often feature an updated logo that better represents the new brand position and direction.
Reviewing identity components with stakeholders ensures the rebrand captures how the company wants customers and prospects to perceive it moving forward. This process of introspection is necessary for formulating a revised identity through a new logo, tagline, visual design system, or other identity markers.
With identity strengthened, companies can boost recognition when they rebrand and attract new customers while retaining existing ones.
Redesign Brand Touchpoints
Touchpoints encompass all avenues where the brand communicates with audiences, such as marketing material, websites, apps, packaging, signage, and more. This crucial step involves revamping these touchpoints to seamlessly align with the refreshed brand identity and personality defined earlier in the process.
Specifically, touchpoints must showcase the new identity elements like colors, fonts, logos, and messaging across all mediums. The redesigned materials, both digital and physical, smoothly and cohesively convey the brand’s new purpose. It is essential to streamline touchpoints influencing the customer journey, such as navigation on a website. Consistency in look and feel strengthens recognition of the brand identity.
Many companies also redesign in-person spaces like storefronts. Properly executing the touchpoint redesign guarantees the redefined brand resonates with audiences through every interaction by presenting a unified brand experience. It finalizes the external shift in how the brand presents itself, setting it up for long-term success in communicating its new vision. In summary, touchpoint redesign epitomizes the identity transformation for customers.
Rolling Out To Customers
Once the new brand identity is complete across all touchpoints, it is time to introduce the rebrand to customers. Rolling out the rebranding announcement to existing customers requires careful planning. Develop a strategic communication strategy to educate current customers about the rationale for the rebrand in a positive, benefit-driven manner.
Clear and consistent messaging about what is improving the customer experience needs to be shared across multiple channels. Various marketing tactics can be leveraged, such as emails, social media posts, direct mailers, and in-person events. Visuals showing the new logo alongside descriptions of how it represents the brand’s evolution help customers understand and welcome the change.
The rollout timing is also crucial, aiming to generate buzz without confusing loyal customers. A gradual, multi-phased rollout allows for addressing issues while maximizing customer retention. Engaging customer feedback throughout the process helps ensure a smooth transition. Proper preparation and execution when introducing the rebrand to current customers lay the foundation for strengthening these vital relationships long-term.
Measuring Success
It is important to measure key performance indicators to determine if the rebranding efforts were successful. Developing a rebranding checklist at the start allows companies to establish benchmarks and metrics to track. Typical metrics include website traffic, social media engagement, sales numbers, and customer retention rates.
Comparing these metrics to pre-rebranding baselines and goals helps gauge impact over time. Both qualitative research, like surveys and quantitative analytics from the new website, provide valuable insights. Ongoing A/B testing throughout the rebranding campaign helps optimize.
Revisiting market research to assess whether the desired changes in brand awareness, perception, and positioning have been achieved is a vital indicator of the effectiveness of rebranding vs repositioning efforts. Regular evaluations against the initial objectives help determine the successes and areas needing adjustment.
Refining efforts based on measured results ensures the rebrand delivers enduring benefits. Documenting lessons learned prepares the organization for future branding projects. Measuring progress is critical to ensuring rebranding initiatives meet their goals and business targets.
Things That Can Go Wrong During a Rebrand
Rebranding has the potential to attract new customers and increase market share, but it can also be a risky move. Without a well-planned strategy, companies risk losing the value of their brand, losing loyal customers, and reducing their brand equity. There are several common rebranding mistakes that companies make during the rebranding process.
Incomplete Research
Without thoroughly understanding the target audience’s wants, needs, and perceptions of the existing brand, there is a strong possibility that the newly developed brand identity will fail to resonate and connect with customers truly.
Surface-level research may lead a company to rebrand for the wrong reasons or miss opportunities to position the brand better that deeper audience insights could uncover. It can result in new messaging, visuals, and branding not communicating the value proposition because critical perspectives and insights were not learned during the research.
As a result, the rebrand may not improve important metrics like brand awareness, perception, and loyalty due to missing the audience’s point of view in shaping the new brand. Incomplete research also risks alienating existing customers or failing to attract new customers to the brand.
It could increase costs in the long term if modifications are needed later due to research gaps. Overall, insufficient upfront research damages brand credibility and risks a lower return on investment from the rebrand since metrics may not be positively impacted without comprehensive audience research guiding decision-making.
Not Involving the Team
Another big mistake when rebranding is failing to involve the internal team. Rebranding is a significant change that impacts the entire organization, so it’s crucial to get buy-in and engagement from employees. If the team is not brought on board from the beginning, several risks can arise.
Employees may resist the changes if they do not understand the reasons for the rebrand or feel like their input was ignored. It can negatively impact morale and productivity. The team also needs to be educated on how to represent the new brand identity properly. Without training and resources, inconsistencies that confuse customers can occur.
Rebranding fatigue may occur more quickly if employees do not embrace ownership of the new brand. It’s also essential for the team to help identify potential issues or roadblocks early on. An excluded team cannot provide this valuable feedback.
Inconsistency Across All Touchpoints
Failing to maintain consistency across all touchpoints poses significant risks. When the new brand identity is applied unevenly in some areas but not others, it can lead to considerable confusion among both customers and employees. The fragmented messaging dismantles any explicit communication of what the company stands for now.
Customers may question whether certain branded materials still represent the business accurately. It undermines the entire purpose of establishing a cohesive brand makeover. Inconsistency also diminishes the impact of the rebrand, as the haphazard presentation dilutes brand recognition and recall over time. It becomes difficult to track performance and measure the true success of the rebrand if not correctly implemented uniformly.
Inconsistencies could persist and perpetuate if not identified and addressed. The result is a weakened, disjointed brand that does little to differentiate the company in the eyes of the target audience. To avoid these risks, meticulous coordination across all departments is critical to rolling out changes seamlessly through aligned branding at every touchpoint.
Not Properly Announcing the Rebrand
How a company announces its rebrand is crucial. Failing to communicate the changes to stakeholders poses risks. If employees and customers are adequately notified about the new brand identity, it can lead to clarity.
Without an announcement, people won’t understand why aspects of the brand look different now. It erodes trust and credibility. A lack of announcements also means missing out on valuable PR opportunities to generate awareness. Not promoting the rebrand fails to showcase brand evolution and thought leadership.
It risks the new identity being overlooked or ignored. If media and influencers are not engaged, positive coverage can’t reinforce the rebrand. Announcing later may even damage perceptions if people feel kept in the dark. The overall impact is a disjointed, messy rebrand launch that does not maximize opportunities.
The solution is to create a rebranding presentation deck and communication strategy. Synergistically these two efforts facilitate increased brand awareness and market acceptance.
Failing To Measure Success With Clear Metrics
Companies must define key performance indicators upfront to ensure they can measure whether the rebrand has achieved its intended goals. Without baseline metrics to compare to, it becomes almost impossible to determine if the brand has increased in areas like awareness, favorability, customer retention, or sales.
Not tracking results after the launch also means missing out on valuable insights into how the target audience is reacting to and interacting with the new brand. Any issues or opportunities for improvement will go unnoticed without ongoing metrics analysis. It can lead to spending money on something other than branding efforts that make the desired impact.
It also makes it challenging to identify a return on investment for the rebrand. Not defining or tracking metrics leaves companies flying blind to whether they have successfully repositioned their brand in the market.
Data-Driven Rebranding Strategy
If you’re looking for a reliable way to rebrand your business and ensure top performance, SmashBrand can help. Our team of expert strategists and testing specialists conducts thorough research, designs effective strategies, and validate all brand assets to ensure they perform exceptionally well in the marketplace. Book a call with us to learn more about how we can help you find the perfect name and discuss your project with our team.
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