Despite how exciting it sounds, a rebranding project is always one of the most challenging tasks for companies. It is because there is a massive risk of losing everything at once if the rebrand doesn’t go as planned. And, of course, what else could be worse than seeing your brand crumble to the ground?
To avoid such horrible situations, here is a complete guide on how to execute a rebranding project. In this article, you will learn the key things to include when starting the rebranding process and ensure the branding project brings the intended results.
We’ve broken down the process into simple steps that can act as a rebranding checklist to ensure everything goes smoothly.
If that sounds interesting enough, then keep on reading to learn more!
Conducting a Brand Audit
Whether launching a complete rebranding campaign for the existing brand or just considering a brand refresh, you must always start with a thorough brand audit. Conducting a detailed audit helps uncover winning opportunities, current brand perception, and positioning in the market.
Brand audits help analyze the brand from multiple angles before moving forward with the change. It allows businesses to learn about their strengths and weaknesses and focus on what needs to be improved from the customer’s point of view.
Here are some steps to conduct a meaningful brand audit before launching the actual rebranding project:
Analyze Customer Perceptions Through Surveys
Companies must conduct in-depth customer surveys and learn how the brand resonates with its target audience. These surveys may include questions about brand perceptions and how customers feel about the existing products and their features. It will help analyze the brand personality and provide qualitative insights beyond numbers.
Evaluate Past Marketing Efforts
Look at past marketing efforts and analyze branding elements, such as marketing campaigns, websites, social media posts, and ads. Understand which elements worked best and failed to bring the intended results. It will help you avoid mistakes from the past and allow you to develop a better and more structured plan.
Assess the Financial Performance of the Brand
When conducting a brand audit, assessing its financial performance is essential. Companies must analyze their product/category financials, including revenues, profits, sales growth rates, etc. It will provide an objective view of the brand’s performance in the market. It forms a critical input for a successful rebranding roadmap.
Benchmarking Against Competitor’s Branding
Establishing benchmarks is the final and most vital step in a brand audit. It includes competitor brand values, messaging, visual identities, and architecture. These benchmarks allow brands to identify opportunities and gaps and stay ahead of competitors. Moreover, it will enable brands to stand out and be unique.
Step 2: Defining the Rebranding Strategy and Scope
After conducting the brand audit, the next step is to define the rebranding strategy and scope. This step is crucial and must involve the key stakeholders and internal and external teams.
When determining the scope of a rebranding strategy, companies may answer some basic rebranding questions first. These questions may start with the need for a rebrand. Businesses must decide whether they need a complete rebrand or a partial rebrand.
The following are some steps in defining the rebranding strategy and scope:
Determine Goals and Objectives
Begin with defining practical goals and actionable objectives. Companies should establish goals like increasing sales by 10% or generating 20% leads in the next quarter. Well-defined objectives keep the rebranding effort focused on tangible outcomes.
Decide the Scope of the Rebrand
A highly essential decision is the scope of the rebrand. The information gained from analyzing the existing brand in step one is beneficial here. It allows businesses to decide, based on the actual figures, whether they need to undergo a complete brand change or just a partial rebrand. Sometimes, there might be a need for a slight brand refresh.
Get Buy-ins from Key Stakeholders
A strong brand must involve stakeholders whenever making a significant decision. Companies must identify stakeholders impacted by the rebrand, such as employees, and get their feedback and support for the changes upfront. It ensures the smooth implementation of the changes and enhances the rebranding process.
The rebranding strategy lays the roadmap to resolve any issues uncovered in the audit. It determines the new positioning, messaging, and visual brand identity to better align with new and existing customers. Defining strategy and scope upfront guides all future rebranding decisions and resource allocation.
Developing the New Brand Identity
After conducting thorough research and developing a successful strategy, it is time to build a new brand identity. This newly developed brand identity must be consistent across all touchpoints to ensure success. The following are some of the critical inclusions when developing a new brand identity:
Create a New Logo and Brand Marks
After gathering meaningful insights from the brand audit, companies must decide whether to consider a complete logo rebranding or a refresh to align it with the evolving customers’ needs. A rebrand doesn’t always mean developing a new logo from scratch.
During the logo rebranding, consider a general rule of thumb, “Less is more!” There is no need to over-complicate the logo design. Instead, choose a simple, minimalist, elegant design that resonates with the target audience’s interest.
It should be unique and easy to remember. There are hundreds of successful logo rebrands to learn from. For instance, the all-time famous tech giant Apple’s logo was a vintage image of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree in the early days. But with time, the logo design became more modern, elegant, and minimal.
When developing a new brand identity, the new logo design must convey its complete message without depending on colors.
Define Appropriate Brand Elements
The next step is to work on branding elements after tweaking the logo and aligning it with the brand goals. These include brand colors, fonts & typography, and visual style. Businesses must ensure consistency among these elements across all touchpoints as they will directly communicate the brand message to the target audience.
Additionally, when choosing a color pallet, theme, or typography, ensure it aligns well with the target audience’s interest and the brand personality. In-depth market research is the key to success in this step because it helps companies learn about their competitors and identify gaps in the market.
Establish Brand Voice and Personality
After selecting the suitable logo and branding elements, it is time to focus on building a solid brand voice and cohesive brand personality. These are extremely important for spreading the brand awareness. During a successful rebranding roll-out plan, companies usually focus on introducing emotionally engaging aspects such as caring about the health of the target customers or environment.
For instance, when rebranding products, the company may mention organic and healthy ingredients and show its commitment to providing nutritious food to its customers. After defining new identity elements, companies may also define comprehensive brand guidelines to document the identity standards and ensure proper usage. It empowers teams and agencies to represent the brand uniformly.
Updating Brand Assets and Materials
Now, with a new brand identity defined and appropriately documenting the brand guidelines, the next step is to update all the brand materials and assets. This is because old assets and materials may no longer be relevant to the new brand identity, and it may result in ambiguity. It also helps keep everything on the same page and maintain consistency across all touchpoints.
Here’s a step-by-step approach to updating brand assets and materials to maximize brand awareness and ensure audiences recognize the transformed brand:
Redesign the Branding Materials
After developing a new brand identity, businesses should spread the word with printed media. Although it may sound a bit dated, especially in the modern era of social media and the internet, it is helpful. Companies may introduce new banners, cards, and brochures with updated logos, colors, fonts, and typography.
It can quickly grab the target audience’s attention during conferences, seminars, and meetups. These are still excellent sources to capture the initial attention when implementing the brand strategy.
Update The Digital Assets
Maintaining a solid online presence has become oxygen and fresh air for companies. After implementing the rebrand, it is best to start working on updating the online presence to spread the word about the brand change.
Since companies usually connect with a global audience, the rebranding announcement should be divided into multiple stages. It helps to create hype and excitement around the rebranding and ensures everything is rolled out smoothly and controlled.
Similarly, updating the company’s webpage according to the new brand guidelines is essential to align it with the goals. Additionally, brands should frequently update their social media pages with the latest news and promotions about the new brand identity to enhance brand awareness.
Companies can leverage the power of digital marketing, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), email marketing (EM), and paid ads to increase their reach and engage with new potential customers.
Refresh Stationery, Uniforms, and Physical Assets
As mentioned several times, consistency is the key to success in branding and marketing. Therefore, businesses must stay up to date in every aspect. After rolling out the rebrand, the old assets, such as stationary with outdated logos, business cards, letterheads, uniforms, and other physical assets, may not be relevant anymore.
It is time to replace the old stationery and physical assets according to the new brand guidelines. It helps to create a whole new image of the brand and its products and allows consumers and stakeholders to recognize and support the brand change quickly.
Implementing the New Brand
After developing a new brand identity and marketing collateral for the rebranding effort, companies should move towards implementing the new brand. It is another critical step that must be executed with extreme care.
The goal is to retain the old customers while attracting new ones, so it must be ensured that the marketing materials are perfectly aligned with the target audience’s interests.
The following are some tips on successfully implementing the new brand without hurting the existing brand presence:
Ensure Brand Consistency
Companies must train their employees on brand guidelines, so they fully understand the new visuals, voice, and messaging. Create a sign-off process for all external materials to ensure adherence to guidelines.
Appoint brand champions within departments to monitor consistency and address any issues. Consistency in each element ensures a strong brand presence and makes the rebrand highly successful.
Announce the Rebranding Project
When announcing the rebranding project, brands may host launch parties to introduce stakeholders like customers, partners, and press to the new brand vision. Since the technological world is moving fast, companies must carefully select the channel for conveying their brand messaging.
With video-based content quickly gaining popularity, companies may utilize channels such as Facebook and Instagram reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. Partnering with social media influences and celebrities is another popular and effective method to announce brand changes in a positive and impactful way.
Consider working with an agency for support.
Full-time rebranding agencies, such as SmashBrand, specialize in conducting market research, performing competition and brand analysis, and helping companies rebrand. It is best to collaborate with such agencies to streamline the process and reduce risks of rebranding.
A full-service branding agency can assist with brand strategy, identity design, material development, launch planning, and post-launch evaluation. For rebranding projects, agencies provide dedicated project management, keeping efforts focused.
Their experience launching other brands provides best practices. Outsourcing some work reduces internal resource burden.
Measuring Success and Maintaining Brand Equity
After implementing the rebrand, companies must define key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs allow companies to track the successful rebrand’s performance and help maintain the brand after changes. The following are some crucial KPIs to follow the pre and post-rebrand performance of the company and ensure everything goes smoothly:
- Brand Awareness – To measure how many people recognize the brand name and its identity after making the changes. Companies can leverage surveys to measure brand awareness.
- Brand Recognition – To measure whether the rebranded logo and other branding elements are easily identifiable and associated with the company. It can be measured through recognition testing.
- Web and Social Media Traffic – To measure the target audience’s daily, monthly, yearly, and seasonal engagement with the website and social media pages. There are several analytic tools, such as Google Analytics, to track such performance.
- Customer Satisfaction – To identify whether customers are happy with the changes or not. Companies can leverage focus groups, product-specific pages, and general polls to track customer satisfaction.
- Sales Conversions – The ultimate goal is higher conversion rates, revenue, and average order value over the long run. Tracking sales conversions and supply chain performance is crucial to extract meaningful insights about the implemented brand strategy.
- Customer Retention – A successful rebrand often improves retention rates as customers relate more to the transformed brand. If there is a decrease in brand value, companies should immediately take action.
- Media Coverage – Earned articles, mentions, and influencer posts raise the brand profile and reach wider audiences. Creating engaging content related to the rebrand must be tracked and with tools to assess its performance over time.
Data Driven Rebranding with SmashBrand
Looking to implement new brand changes? Want to make your current brand aligned with the ever evolving market needs? We can help. SmashBrand is a rebranding agency that researches, designs, and tests all brand assets to ensure peak shelf performance. Book a time to learn more about how we can help you find the right name and to discuss your project with our team.
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