Managing a rebrand

Posted by Jane Toohey on 18 November 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: rebrand

Before you embark on a complete rebrand it is important to check in with your target market first.

It’s imperative to evolve your brand over time, to keep it fresh, relevant and continuing to add value to the business and your customers. But it’s also important not to rush into a rebrand without first checking in with your target market….

First, analyse aspects such as:

• how relevant is the brand currently to the target audience?
• how is the brand currently positioned in their minds?
• what are the changes that are impacting the brand in it’s environment?

It’s important not to cling to the past during a rebranding project, remain objective. Do you have an inflated view of the brand equity that has been built over time? The only way to find out is to ask your customers and prospects. It’s also important to not go rushing in, creating change for change sake. Your brand’s equity is very much about the perception in the market of it’s value to your customers, what you see as valuable may not be what your customers see. Go out and speak to them, understand how they see your brand, which aspects of it are important such as the name, the look & feel, the experience of the brand and which aspects can be changed without harming the brand relationship.

If you’re considering a name change analyse the impact first. A product brand name such as for a skincare range, may be very important to the customers and a change may take considerable amounts of dollars to ensure the new brand has shelf presence, is remembered and associated with brand values and hence doesn’t impact sales. But then the name for a consulting firm may be far less important, as it’s the brand experience, the relationship the customers have with the consultants, which may be far more important. In fact often, professional services firms inherit names from the founder, who may be retired and long gone, rendering the name irrelevant.

It’s important to evaluate your business as a customer, spend a day in their shoes, navigate your own website, call your own help desk, buy one of your own products, what is the brand experience, evaluate each touch point and consider the impact a brand change will have and how that change will need to be managed across all customer touchpoints.

Before you embark on a rebrand make a plan, not only about the creative changes but also about how the changes will be introduced to the market. Write a step-by-step plan to firstly make the changes and then introduce them. Sometimes it is best to make the change all in one go, other times a softly softly introduction is best, ensuring the market accepts each part of the change as you go.

Ensure your reband has credibility. The story of why it is occurring must be credible with the audience. The employees must ‘buy’ the rebrand first as they are the advocates of the brand and will be the ones explaining it to the customers. If they don’t believe it, then the customers won’t.

When Andersen Consulting cut ties with Arthur Andersen, they did the worst thing a company could do -- they chose a new brand name without any meaning and did a terrible job at explaining to the market. Although it was supposedly inspired by the phrase "accent on the future," it tells the customer nothing, and stands for nothing. The change cost Andersen/Accenture an estimated $100 million to execute and was regarded as one of the worst rebrandings in corporate history!

At the same time a reband doesn’t have to be about the name or logo. Old Spice used former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa to tell women to "Look at your man, now back at me," Old Spice is suddenly a new Old Spice. The 70-year-old brand's ad campaign generated tens of millions of online views. Old Spice followed up with 186 related videos in which Mustafa directly responded to digital queries from bloggers and celebrities including Perez Hilton, Ellen DeGeneres, and Alyssa Milano. The company's efforts in reinventing the brand image worked, sales of Old Spice Body Wash rose 11 percent over 12 months in 2010, and sales have continued to gain momentum. A clever ad and smart use of social media can produce a new identity, even for a brand that many associate with their grandfather's deodorant. Old Spice didn't change its logo; it changed the brand experience.

When managing a rebrand you must understand the new environment it will operate in. What are the changes in technology affecting your brand, what are other industries doing, what are competitors up to and most importantly how is customer behaviour changing? Rebranding can be a costly exercise and you don’t want to unnecessarily spend time, money, resources and effort on a strategy that is not fully thought out. Work out the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats involved before going ahead, but when you do decide to go ahead, do it properly, commit to the process and maintain the integrity of the new brand promise.