October 1, 2021
The mere mention of a rebrand can send panic rippling across marketing, sales, and management teams alike. But a rebrand doesn’t have to be a painful, headache fueled experience. First evaluating the purpose when considering a rebrand is great place to start. Here are a few additional steps worth considering when contemplating the necessity of a rebrand…
1. Modernization and Remaining Relevant
The most common and obvious reason for undertaking a rebranding is modernizing your brand, including voice, style, tone, and visuals. Staying relevant and relatable among your target audiences is important, as well as staying on top of trends. Looking and sounding outdated is one of the quickest ways to lose market share and brand equity.
2. Mergers, Acquisitions, and Spin-offs
While a rebrand may be necessary based on a merger, acquisition or spin-off, it’s also a way to create a multi-layered strategy approach utilizing PR to create a new and fresh buzz around your brand. This can attract new audiences or help break into market or geographic segments you may otherwise have been unable to do. It’s always a good idea to keep your eye on your ideal buyers and target audiences to ensure you aren’t alienating your best customers, but there is always a way to accomplish both with the right strategy and creative approach.
3. Expanded Brand Development
There are several ways to engage a rebranding process, and building out your brand to it’s fullest potential is a big one (and actually one of my favorite reasons). If your brand or business doesn’t have defined values, or a values based marketing plan in place, that can affect how you will continue to relate to not only target audiences, but generational audiences as the grow and age.Perhaps you’re launching a new product, or you want your brand to attract new audiences (particularly in the digital world). There is a lot of opportunity to leverage existing brand equity while building out your brand more fully with a complete tone, style, voice, positioning, and market sector, ideal buyers personas, value proposition and more. These tools can create a solid foundation for your brand now and in the future, while identifying weaknesses, and opportunities for growth.
4. Reputation, Image Control, Repositioning and Changing Markets
Admittedly, there are many reasons to enter into a rebranding process, with only a few covered in this article. Reputation control is another obvious one after negative press. We all probably remember the disastrous rebrand of JC Penney and GAP, where both were reverted back to their previous look (Gap’s lasted 5 days). However, I’ve also had clients enter a rebranding after a previous refresh failed to impress key customer segments, or caused merchandising, fulfillment and large order purchasing issues due to naming conventions or a name that is too familiar to an unrelated product. Understanding the purpose for your rebrand prior to engaging an agency is a vital step in a successful rebrand process.
5. Inconsistency & Down Turn in Revenue
There are various signs to watch out for that will tell you it’s time to rebrand. If there is a lack in consistency in how employees are telling the company story, or elevator pitch. Or no one can tell you exactly what the value proposition is. Or perhaps the visuals and logo use have lost consistency, creating confusion that is visible in a lack of brand ambassadorship, loyal following of customers or employees, and yes, a downturn in sales. Seth Godin puts it best: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” When a brand is presented in a consistent visual way along with tone, voice, and style, people will engage. When there is a lack of consistency, you will start to see a drop in engagement.
