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Table Of Content
What exactly is rebranding?
Rebranding Tips
Plan Ahead
Identify the Level of Change Needed
Set a Realistic Budget & Timeline
Find the Best Branding Partner
Utilize a Data-Driven Strategy
Believe in the Process
Examine Your Goals
Fully Commit to the Change
Launch Your New Brand
Maintain Realistic Expectations
The practice of altering how a company or product is regarded is known as rebranding. Everything from your brand name and slogan to your visual identity and logo to your marketing assets and website may be reimagined as part of a rebranding campaign.
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Rebranding is a difficult task. Things take time to do it correctly. However, these two truths do not imply that your rebranding must be gloomy and overbearing. A rebranding project can be an exciting, cathartic experience with a little planning and awareness of the process. Particularly if you adhere to the rebranding recommended practices indicated below. The following are ten crucial rebranding recommendations for making the most of your rebranding experience and creating a captivating, unified, and memorable brand.
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Plan Ahead
When it comes to branding, like with other things in life, planning is essential. Given the expense that full branding requires, it's critical to prepare ahead to optimize your return.
- The first of our rebranding suggestions is straightforward: the more planning you do ahead of time, the more efficient and powerful your rebrand will be. A decent preparation method should look like this: The necessity of senior leadership buy-in on the advantages of rebranding should be prioritized in your rebranding plan.
- Before the process begins, decision-makers should be made aware of the impending need for, and practical usefulness of, a rebrand. Following that, you'll want to identify the internal stakeholders that will comprise your rebranding team. This team should comprise the C-suite and other important decision-makers, such as marketing, sales, HR, and customer service representatives—anyone in a leadership position who interacts with customers or workers regularly.
- When senior management is involved in the rebranding process, they have a stake in brand strategy and positioning and may apply brand alignment from the top down.
- The final stage in rebranding preparation is to acquire current branding and marketing assets for the rebrand's discovery phase. The finest rebrands begin with a thorough grasp of the brand's present positioning. By gathering a representative sample of marketing, advertising, and public relations materials, you enable your branding firm to conduct a full brand audit, providing you with an essential assessment of your current brand's strengths and shortcomings.
Identify the Level of Change Needed
- The next rebranding suggestion is to determine what kind of change you require. If you're ready to rebrand, you're probably at a stage where you realize something about your brand has to be fixed but aren't sure how serious the issue is. Do you require a comprehensive rebranding or merely a reworking of your visual identity?
- The latter is referred to as a brand refresh. A refresh is a more tactical manoeuvre that is frequently used to guarantee that your brand is current with market trends. Refreshing a brand may be a large undertaking. After all, it requires reintroducing a new visual and linguistic brand across all of your marketing touchpoints.
- A rebrand, on the other hand, is a comprehensive repositioning of your company. It is a basic reset for businesses dealing with deep-seated challenges that frequently accompany fast expansion, a change in business strategy, or a severely unfavourable public relations catastrophe. When you rebrand, you are letting go of what your brand was to become what it can be. If your present brand is horribly mismatched with your company plan, or if bad brand equity is actively sabotaging your aims, a rebrand is the only option.
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Set a Realistic Budget & Timeline
Next on our list of rebranding suggestions is to make sure you have the time and money to do it correctly. A rebranding might be an expensive venture, but when done well, it is always worthwhile.
- According to studies, your brand might account for up to 40% of your company's overall worth. When you consider that a rebrand should be effective over the next five to ten years, you can see why rebranding should be viewed as a long-term investment rather than a line item on your marketing budget. Any rebranding expense should be spread out across the life of the brand.
- Securing appropriate money for each step of the program is one of the best practices for rebranding. A rebranding process lasts 6 to 12 months and includes research, strategy, and brand design. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization brand activation might take another 6 to 12 months.
- When it comes to timing, most of the businesses we work with have been considering rebranding for at least a couple of years. When they eventually decide to proceed, they feel a sudden need to complete the task as fast as possible. Why hasten the process of rebranding if it will last you five to 10 years? Each of the various processes involved in a rebranding takes time to complete correctly. Thorough brand research may take months to plan, coordinate, and execute for even a minor redesign.
- Each of these activities takes time and is frequently reliant on the schedules of other initiatives. Carefully studied positioning, a unified brand identity, and a thorough website—each of these initiatives takes time and is often dependent on the timeframes of other initiatives. Cutting shortcuts in any one area is likely to affect the quality of the branding, costing you extra time to rebuild it right in the long run.
Find the Best Branding Partner
Choosing the appropriate branding agency is one of the most crucial rebranding recommendations. It is critical to choose a partner with proven outcomes who knows your needs and with whom you can build a trustworthy connection. Spending time assessing different rebranding agencies to ensure the proper fit is worthwhile. When looking for the perfect spouse, you should consider the following questions:
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Do their ideals and culture match yours?
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Do they guarantee senior-level competence and talent?
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Is their method based on thorough, objective research?
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Do they have a track record of success in your sector, as evidenced by case studies?
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Do they thrive at creative execution across several media?
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Do they appear agile and flexible to the inevitable changes?
As you can see, picking which rebranding firm to choose depends on a variety of aspects, including job quality, industry experience, and cultural fit. However, the most crucial question should be one of expertise. Is the agency you're considering only focused on rebranding? Or is it a marketing firm that offers rebranding as one of its services? Marketing and branding are intertwined yet fundamentally distinct.
- Marketing's purpose is to create short-term activations that result in rapid, quantifiable, and ultimately transient sales increases. The purpose of branding, on the other hand, is the long-term accumulation of brand equity, which leads to slow, but eventually more significant, business growth. Rebranding is about setting your company up for long-term success by developing a strategic framework that capitalizes on competitive advantages for sustainable market performance.
- Only a rebranding firm has the skills required to successfully rename your company. This is not the same firm you would hire for a digital marketing or public relations campaign. In truth, a company can only excel at one thing. Shouldn't you deal with a rebranding agency when it comes to anything as important as your brand?
Utilize a Data-Driven Strategy
- If there's one thing we've learned over the years, it's that there's no substitute for facts when it comes to making the difficult decisions that come with a rebrand. As a result, our second rebranding suggestion is to take a data-driven approach to your rebrand. The truth is that any rebranding has a lot at stake, whether you're a mom-and-pop shop or a multibillion-dollar worldwide corporation. Your brand is how others view your company. If you do your rebranding wrong, it will almost certainly hurt your bottom line.
- The greatest method to reduce the risks involved with rebranding is to use data to inform every choice in your rebrand. The information you'll need comes from a single source: extensive brand research, both internally and outside. Internal brand research demonstrates how your company's brand is regarded by internal stakeholders, including your workers. Employees are the only individuals who truly understand your brand. Understanding how they perceive your brand through interviews and surveys is the only way to know how to optimize your brand to attract and retain top individuals in the industry. This is referred to as your employer brand.
- External brand research exposes how your brand is regarded by your consumers and other external stakeholders. Combining qualitative research projects such as customer interviews and focus groups with quantitative research such as polls and surveys is the most effective approach to determine what your consumers want and how they perceive your brand to satisfy those requirements.
- Internal and external research data provides you with the clarity and confidence you need to make key choices about the future of your brand—and your business. The more extensive your rebranding, the more necessary it is to conduct extensive research. A superficial brand refresh may simply require minimal research to corroborate working assumptions, but a complete brand reboot necessitates a comprehensive research project before considering any strategy or repositioning.
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Believe in the Process
Rebranding is a four-phase process, with each step being equally significant. It may be tempting to skip stages to save time and/or money, but experts warn that doing so will only cost you in the long term. Taking the effort to go through a tried-and-true rebranding process will ensure that the result—your new brand—is optimized for performance and ready to withstand the test of time. Understanding the five stages of the rebranding process—and what to expect from each of them—is one of our most critical rebranding tips:
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Research: All effective branding campaigns, as we discussed in the preceding rebranding advice, begin with rigorous, in-depth research. Brand research will help you understand how your brand is regarded by internal and external stakeholders, as well as where it fits in the competitive environment.
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Strategy: The act of developing a framework that best positions your brand for distinctiveness and growth is known as brand strategy. During the strategy phase, basic aspects such as your brand compass, brand personality, key differentiators, and brand promise are developed and used to construct your brand framework.
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Identity: The identity of your brand is more than simply a logo. It is the visual and verbal manifestation of the strategy phase's positioning work. A strong visual and verbal identity will capture your brand's distinguishing characteristics and infuse purpose and personality into all important components of your brand experience (website, brand messaging, marketing collateral, etc.).
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Activation: Brand activation is the process of exposing your new brand to the world, as we'll see in rebranding tip #9 below. It is a comprehensive endeavour that goes beyond simply introducing your brand. It encompasses everything from internal brand training to ongoing brand management, ensuring that your brand is consistently and cohesively performed from the inside out.
- Rebranding necessitates an idealistic mindset. It is critical to think big and look forward. However, one of the most significant rebranding suggestions we can offer is the distinction between aspirational and unrealistic. Finally, your brand is a commitment you make to those you serve. Making good on that promise becomes the basis of client trust, which forms the basis of brand loyalty.
- If your rebranding ambitions are too lofty, you risk creating a brand that your firm cannot properly be expected to deliver on. Authenticity is essential in this equation. As we've previously stated, authenticity is a term that is frequently used in the branding business. But that doesn't make it any less significant.
- When it comes to the basic values of its workers and consumers, the world's most successful businesses are firmly united. They are also in line with the real-world strategy and goals of the company behind the brand. These alignments are indicative of genuine brand authenticity. They are also a sign of firms that have created realistically aspirational brands.
- Brands that allow the company to expand without disappointing its customers and/or staff. It's a problem we see in many of the companies we work with. When it comes to planning their new brand, what is the acceptable amount of aspiration? The ultimate objective is to create a brand that is consistent with your company plan and the values of the people you serve.
- Recently, a customer we worked with chose to begin on the rebranding path after realizing the company's fast development demanded an update. The difficulty was that they realized this not long after being purchased by a private equity group. The firm was under enormous pressure from new owners to reach aggressive growth objectives quarter after quarter. The organization wants the advantages of a fresh brand without the danger of drastic change.
- Despite extensive research indicating the need for a major rebranding, the corporation was never truly committed to the transition. To protect against unmet short-term financial objectives, they sought to retain one foot in the past. This gets us to the eighth of our rebranding tips: whether you decide to rebrand or not, you must commit to the change. If the moment isn't right to rebrand, you should wait till it is. A lack of dedication is one of the most costly blunders in rebranding.
- The last thing you want is for your new brand to be half-measured. Of course, there will always be unanticipated occurrences; they have a habit of appearing when you least expect them. An organizational crisis, a major shift in objectives, or a lack of funding—if you must abandon your rebrand due to events beyond your control, there is no guilt in putting it on hold until you are ready to commit to the change. However, there comes a "point of no return" in every rebranding process where it makes financial sense to follow it through, despite external pressures pulling against it.
- Imagine exchanging a 200,000-mile mid-market automobile for a brand-new Ferrari with all the inside and external enhancements, storing it in your garage, and then leaving it there for eternity. This is what many businesses do when they invest time and money in rebranding only to fall short when it comes to brand activation. The following rebranding advice is crucial: the introduction of your new brand is not the end of the rebranding process. In reality, this is only the beginning.
- You'll never get the most out of your investment if you don't aggressively bring your new brand in front of the eyes of your target market. Brand activation, like many other aspects of a rebrand, comprises both internal and external aspects. Internally, activation entails teaching workers and other internal stakeholders how to promote your new brand to the rest of the world. It requires incorporating your new brand into all staff documents, using your newly established core values in recruiting choices, and actively fostering the business culture implied by your new brand.
- Externally, activation entails introducing your new brand to all of your target audiences, implementing it across marketing touchpoints, developing a brand communication strategy, and establishing ongoing brand management to ensure that your brand is consistently executed in all of its various forms. A good rebrand creates a new brand experience that is specifically customized to a certain customer or audience. However, only brand activation can ensure that those audiences encounter your new brand.
Maintain Realistic Expectations
The final piece of advice for rebranding your firm is to know what to expect—and to keep those expectations realistic. A rebrand has several benefits, but it is not a panacea for all of your company's difficulties. Three of the most essential benefits of a rebrand are unanimity, clarity, and confidence. For starters, rebranding helps you to finally get rid of the hazy and ill-defined tenets that underpin your brand. Key stakeholders will explicitly identify and agree on foundational pillars like as purpose, mission, vision, and values. It's difficult to overestimate the importance of such leadership unanimity. Its beneficial effects can be felt across a company. A well-established competitive differentiator is another outcome of the rebranding process. By outlining the unique benefits you provide to your clients, you can make a far more convincing case for why they should select you over the competition. Finally, a rebrand instils trust in you and your firm. When it comes to branding, few things are more crucial than confidence, from leadership to frontline personnel to customers themselves. A strong and consistent brand empowers internal stakeholders to be enthusiastic brand champions. It also stimulates customers to connect themselves with your brand.