When you notice that your brand has run out of steam, it can put a real downer on your business plans. You spent a lot of time developing your public image and now it no longer serves you. You worry about the future of your firm and how you’ll continue to generate sales.
Fortunately, rebranding is a relatively straightforward operation. While it means changing how you do things, it doesn’t involve a great deal of effort. Once you have a proper process laid out, it only takes a few weeks. And it could help to turn your brand around.
But before we take a look at what you need to do, it’s worth discussing what we mean by a rebrand.
For some brands, it means a refresh. Instead of changing the brand entirely, companies simply tweak their existing themes and logos to make them more up-to-date. There are all sorts of firms that have done this, from Microsoft to Burger King.
Another term you might see is “partial rebrand.” Here firms change some elements of their brand, but not others. For example, they might keep the font but change the colors.
Then there are full rebrands. These involve making wholesale changes to the brand, or even changing the name if it doesn’t work. A good example of this is Facebook moving to Meta.
There are several instances in which a rebrand makes sense. These include when:
- You want to launch a new set of products and services, and keeping the old brand doesn’t make much sense
- You want to distance yourself from your brand’s bad reputation in the past
- You want to change your brand so it better reflects your business and the value you can bring
- You are making significant structural changes to your company and your old brand no longer makes sense
- Your brand has become culturally insensitive in some way and you need to modify it
Let’s take a look at some of the steps you need to take for a successful rebranding.
Step 1: Get Your Team Together
Rebranding is a challenging task. It often requires putting your best and brightest minds in a room and getting them to come up with something new and original.
There will be several things you’ll need to discuss. These include:
- Whether you’ll use in-house staff or freelancers
- Whether you need a fresh start or if a brand tweak will suffice
- What do you want your rebranding to achieve
- How much it’ll cost
- The logistics of changing all your branding across platforms, stores, locations, and offices
Step 2: Figure Out What You’re Doing Right And Wrong
The next step is to take a look at what you are doing right as well as wrong. As always, you should follow the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Branding can be extensive, so you’ll want to plan what you want to change with your team. Here’s a list of items that you may need to modify in any brand rethink:
- How you operate on social media
- Your trading names
- Your slogan and logo
- The type of fonts you use
- Who you will partner with
- The deals you offer
- Your brand voice and tone
- Your website design
- How you create content and what you focus on
- How you decorate your outlets, trade booths, and workstations
Most companies start by taking a look at their sales and marketing data. These metrics often provide insights, showing what’s working, and what isn’t.
Ask which groups prefer your brand and which channels you are having success with. Try to work out why engagement is higher in some places than others. Are you using a different voice? Is the channel closer to your target audience?
Step 3: Ask Your Audiences Which Brand They Prefer
The next step is to communicate directly with your audiences and ask them which brand styles they prefer.
There are two ways of doing this. The first is to create focus groups. Here you randomly sample people from your audience and get them to tell you how they feel about your brand concepts. To improve accuracy, get anonymous feedback.
The other way to do it is to live-test branding elements and see how people respond. This way, they don’t know they are part of an experiment. Instead, they are simply reacting naturally.
The first option is something that larger firms tend to do while the second one is for smaller outfits. If you have the budget, try a combination of both.
Step 4: Watch Your Competition
While you’re rebranding, it’s a good idea to look at what your competition is doing and see whether you can learn anything from them. Rebrands sometimes work but they can backfire spectacularly. That’s something you’ll want to avoid if you can.
Take a look at what your rivals are doing and see if you can copy them. If you notice that brands in your industry are all moving towards the color red, you might want to do something similar.
Step 5: Collect Your New Materials
Once you’ve decided on a new brand image, you’re ready to collect all your new materials. If you work with a branding agency, they should do all this for you. If you don’t, you’ll need to collect items from individual vendors. Remember, some suppliers, like StickerYou, are better at producing specific forms of branded materials than others. Therefore, you’ll need to make sure that you record your brand themes and designs in a standard format document. This way, you can easily share your specifications with advertisers, agencies, and vendors.
Step 6: Launch
The final step is to launch your rebranding efforts and make them public. If your brand is less well-known or you are making major changes, you should include your former name clearly at the same time.
In the run-up to launch, drop plenty of teasers and create press releases, telling your customers what you have planned. Make sure that you create a story around your rebranding so that it doesn’t come out of nowhere.