A company’s brand is often described in terms of logos, color palettes, and overall design style. However, brand identity encompasses so much more than just visual materials. Brand identity is based on the way a firm communicates its values and establishes relationships with its target demographics. Brand identity is also closely tied to the business culture of a company, and helps set the tone for team members, and defines the attitudes people take to doing business. Strong company culture can prove very attractive to consumers, especially when businesses stand out from the pack. One obvious example is Apple, where the whimsical design aesthetics and “thinking outside the box” approach align from product development to executive culture.
A strong brand can stem from a strong identity, where a company knows what it wants to achieve and how it’s going to make that happen. But as times change and unforeseen events occur, a company may need to take stock of the marketplace and change its approach to win new audiences and future-proof its prospects. This is what we mean by a rebrand, but it might be better to think of the process as an evolution.
What Does a Rebrand Mean for Your Business?
A rebranding usually encompasses a wave of market research along with internal reviews into financial stability. These insights will help stakeholders define new goals for the company and come up with a campaign to change the brand perception among audiences. Following this, it’s time to find an appropriate agency. For instance, such an agency as REBRAND can handle the execution of your new vision for the business by applying an effective rebranding strategy. Rebranding means more than coming up with a shiny new logo – a real rebrand takes full measure of a business from the ground up to reshape everything from marketing strategies to company culture. One such is example is the Google subsidiary Android. The mobile operating system developer decided it needed to rebrand itself to a global audience, and by 2019 a new color scheme, logo, mascot, and brand message helped the company establish itself as a global powerhouse competing on the level of Apple and Windows.
Why Should Your Business Rebrand?
Upon starting a company, the key founders and stakeholders usually agree on a mission statement that communicates the business’s vision for its operations. However, with the passage of time, the business may have outgrown the parameters of its original ideals. Target audiences and the way they engage with the company may have changed, or new products or niches will have repositioned the company in the marketplace with new USPs. In these instances, a rebrand presents an opportunity to retain existing customers while reaching new audiences who were not aware of the company’s complete range of offerings.
Is There a Bad Time to Rebrand Your Business?
Bluntly put, yes. While it’s good that businesses seek to modernize, the time and circumstances won’t always be right for a full overhaul. First off, there needs to be a clear vision in place for what a rebranding should achieve. There’s no point in having a rebrand if you don’t know the new position that you want your business to occupy in the marketplace. If you simply want to update your visual materials like your website or logo, this is just an image update, rather than a full-bore rebranding. Although, if your website hasn’t changed in years, then maybe that is a sign that a rebranding might be due.
However, these concerns are usually secondary to the biggest reason of all not to rebrand: you simply can’t afford it. A successful rebrand will require a budgetary outlay at the front end which you’ll be hoping will be recouped further down the road. It will take a lot of creative hiring and outsourcing along with interdepartmental discussions to properly execute a rebrand, and if your profit margins are tight, the cost of such a substantial process may be too much to handle for the time being.
Keys to Successfully Rebranding
If you’re certain that now is the right time to rebrand, then you want to make sure you’re hitting all the right steps to bring your new vision to life. Here are some proven insights to help guide you through the process and achieve a successful rebranding.
Establish Your Goals
Like any great undertaking, you need to understand what goals you’re trying to achieve with rebranding, and why a change is needed in the first place. Ask yourself how exactly the rebranding will help your business grow? If you can’t answer, then it may be time to go back to the drawing board. Second, consider how the rebranding will make your business more competitive.
Listen to Your Target Audience
A big part of the rebranding is normally to bring in new customers from demographics that you haven’t previously managed to connect with. It only makes sense, then, to create conversations with these audiences to get an idea of the shape your rebranding could take. This kind of market research can help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace while revealing areas and strategies that can secure you the best chance of a return on investment. Your customers are your lifeblood, so listen to them when they speak.
Structure Your Rebranding
Every rebranding will require a big investment of time, money, and manpower. If you’re working with a structure for scheduling and budgets, then costs can easily start to spiral out of control. For most companies, we’ll need to outsource much of the rebranding work to ensure sufficient expertise is in place to help realize the new brand vision. You’ll need to find the best market researchers in your field to help generate insights, along with copywriters, graphic designers, and web developers who can bring your rebrand to life. While agencies can execute your brand vision, you need an internal team that can supply a clear breakdown of all the different costs of your rebrand to help you plan a timetable from the different stages of the process.
Final Thoughts
A rebrand provides a terrific opportunity to expand your business’s ambitions and move with the times. However, it’s not the catch-all answer to all of your challenges. It’s a time-consuming and costly process that comes with risks attached, and sometimes growth could be achieved more easily by focusing on product development or a company restructure. Don’t make the decision likely, and ensure that you’re not leaving pre-existing customers behind when pursuing new ones.
