It happens to every company at some point. Maybe your brand feels outdated. Perhaps you’re trying to reach out to a new demographic. Who knows, your products and services may have completely changed recently. Regardless of the reason, every company will go through a rebrand at some point. Some do this gracefully (Read: Old Spice, Apple, UPS), and some flop entirely (Read: Crystal Pepsi). So how can your company be sure to rebrand like champs instead of chumps?
We’ve handled more rebrands than we can count and noticed some key traits of successful rebrands. Here are the first things you should do if you’re looking to potentially rebrand your company.
Question Every Aspect of the Rebrand
An effective rebrand will cost your company a lot of time and money. The last thing you to want to do is make a misstep at the beginning of the process because you didn’t do your due diligence. Question everyone involved in the rebrand to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that you’re not rushing into a rebrand because you’re bored but rather because a unique opportunity exists for your company if you can rebrand successfully.
Here are some great questions to ask before a potential rebrand:
- Why do we want to rebrand our company?
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- What changes have there been in the competitive landscape?
- Does our current brand tell the right story? What story do we want it to tell?
- Why should anyone care about our brand?
- Has our ideal customer changed? If so, how?
- What does our ideal customer want from us? Why?
- Will this rebrand work 5 or 10 years down the road?
- If we were starting our business today, would this brand be what we would start with?
- How are we going to defend this brand and its guidelines? Who has defended our brand in the past? Should that change?
Audit Your Current Brand
What can go? What can stay? What worked about your current brand? What definitely didn’t? Auditing your current brand is the single most effective way to choose a direction for your rebrand, but too often, companies fail to do this adequately.
If you’re looking for a better way to audit your brand, don’t reinvent the wheel. Download our free DIY Brand Audit guide, to ensure that you’re ready to rebrand!
Learn How To Implement: The Secret of Rebranding Success
If you’ve done everything above, you’re headed in the right direction, but the real secret to rebranding success is knowing how to implement your new brand. It doesn’t matter how great your new brand is, if your team doesn’t buy in, you don’t have a new brand. Before you commit to rebranding, you should figure out how you’re going to implement your new brand to be successful. Here are a few tips for implementing your new brand:
- Establish clear financial expectations with all decision makers - Building a brand is hard and expensive work. If your CFO doesn’t know what’s about to hit his bottom line, he’ll get his entire team fighting against this new, expensive endeavor. Ensure everyone knows the financial impact a rebrand will have so there are no surprises.
- The scale of work that goes into a rebrand is astounding to first-timers. If you don’t have a proper project manager at the helm, your new brand will suffer. You either need to hire a branding firm or find an experienced project manager to get your ducks in a row before you start the branding process.
- Emphasize the importance of internal communication - This re-brand will affect the entire organization, and while there’s no “right” timeline to roll a new brand out to the internal staff, you need to make sure that your managers and directors are all on the same page. Different managers have different motivations, so aligning them around this new brand may be difficult, but it’s paramount to success.
While the rebranding process is complicated, we’ve seen dozens of companies rebrand successfully.
Download this free DIY Brand Audit Checklist and get to work.
