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Your business brand goes beyond its name and attractive logo. A brand consists of business ethics, story, and reputation in the marketplace. This is what distinguishes your business from others. Therefore, any rebranding strategy involves changing the original direction of the business. It involves consolidating the aims, vision and modifying the image to reflect the new changes. Rebranding is an exciting venture for most businesses and here are some key steps for a successful rebranding strategy.
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However, without a good rebranding strategy, it can be overwhelming and painstaking. With no strategy, knowledge of where to start, what to handle first, and who can help, you can easily find yourself paralyzed. If you are struggling to rebrand or stalled with your strategy, this guide below can help.
1. Identify The Reason For The Makeover
The first step of developing a rebranding strategy is to identify the reasons for prompting the makeover. Just because your old logo doesn’t look good anymore shouldn’t get you diving into doing a major rebrand. Rebranding takes significant time, energy, and resources. Therefore, you should identify the specific reasons for rebranding. Some of the reasons that may necessitate a rebranding strategy include:
- Merging Companies – You might need a rebranding strategy if your company is merging with another. Both companies should dissolve their logo, goals, and mission for a new identity. Some examples of rebranding mergers include when United Airlines and Continental Airlines merged back in 2010.
- If A Company Is Bought By Another – Also known as an acquisition, you should develop a rebranding strategy. A recent example of an acquisition that required rebranding is when Facebook bought Instagram.
- Appointment Of A New CEO – This is a common reason big companies rebrand. Companies often devise a new rebranding strategy when a new CEO is appointed. To celebrate the brand’s new face, companies undertake a complete rebranding of the logo, marketing strategy, and colors.
- If Your Company Acquires A Wrong Image – An original rebranding strategy becomes inevitable if your company acquires a bad image. This can happen due to poor production, inconsistent messaging, or bad marketing. If this happens to your brand, a complete rebranding of the company image will reposition your business in the market.
- To Reach A Wide Audience – Companies that have been on the market for quite some time also need rebranding to reach a new audience. For instance, if your business was primarily successful with women despite being gender-neutral, changing the logo and branding can help you regain some ground.
That said, most casinos often rebrand due to various reasons, specifically leadership and ownership changes. In such situations, they need to change their names or the design of their properties. Regardless of the reason, makeovers should be done with respect to company values for assured long-term success.
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2. Analyze Your Previous Mistakes
The second step for a successful rebranding strategy is identifying your previous mistakes. You should conduct a thorough evaluation of your previous approach and possible mistakes made by your business. For instance, the management might not be in touch with your customers’ feedback, creating a communication gap.
For instance, Poor and shallow content are common reasons you might need to rebrand a website. Once you have identified the mistakes, include them in your strategy and discuss them with your rebranding team. This involves adopting new and fresh strategies with innovative and productive ideas.
3. Choose A Team
Conducting a complete makeover requires a solid team with the necessary knowledge and expertise to implement the rebranding strategy. A complete rebranding strategy involves several moving parts and processes that can be overwhelming. Therefore, you should pick the right people to complete your rebranding strategy. You have the option of choosing an in-team or hire an agency.
Hiring an in-house team comes with several benefits. For instance, they have a deep understanding of your company and brand culture. Therefore, they can successfully work on your rebranding strategy with the right resources and skills. On the other hand, while agencies do not know much about your company, they are professionals and can complete the process in a bubble. You can also consider a mix of the two options.
4. Conduct A Competitive Analysis
As mentioned, good branding involves great communication with your customers and how you differently present your business to target customers compared to other brands. Therefore, it is prudent to conduct a deep analysis of your competition. Critically analyze your competitor’s branding aspects, including the logo design, messaging, and brand voice. With this, you can easily identify the differences and similarities between your brand and other companies.
5. Complete A Brand Audit
A complete audit of your brand should also feature in your rebranding strategy. The more information and knowledge you have about your company, the better the strategy. Therefore, before officially initiating the makeover, you should understand what’s working, dysfunctional elements, how to grow, and more. Simply put, you should evaluate your business’s current state to make the necessary adjustments in the strategy.
Just like competitive analysis, brand audit presents an opportunity to dive deep into your brand. Insights gathered at this stage will highly influence the direction of your rebranding strategy. With a proper audit, you can determine your business ecosystem areas to prioritize in your strategy.
6. Build A Brand Identity
This stage of your rebranding strategy involves developing your brand’s visual elements. Having conducted competitor analysis, brand audit, and other aspects of your rebranding strategy, you can easily think of a better name, tagline, suitable color, logo, business card design, and other essentials that identify your brand.
These messaging elements are essential for any rebranding strategy’s success, and you might have to start from scratch or refine the existing elements. That said, build an identity by:
- Writing an effective tagline.
- Creating a strong value proposition.
- Identifying your brand voice.
7. Discover The Brand’s Personality
These elements represent the face of your brand. Therefore, ensure that they manifest every touchpoint. The designs should be comprehensive, flexible, intuitive, and accurate to achieve this. The logos, colors, typography, and other interactive elements should be top-notch. Therefore, consider bringing experts on board your rebranding strategy to revise, update, or add to the existing visual identity.
8. Create Brand Guidelines
Some teams or departments are resistant to change. Therefore, you cannot introduce the new brand and leave it for them. Before the unveiling, empower your employees and teams by presenting changes affected by the strategy, including the messaging and visual identity, in neat guidelines. Provide comprehensive directions with checklists to ease understanding. The updated guidelines should also be available and accessible to your team members.
9. Market Your New Brand
The final component in your rebranding strategy is developing a plan to strengthen and promote the new brand. This involves launching it internally to your employees and customers. Make sure that your employees embrace the new brand for ascertained success. That said, consult experienced partners who can give the rebranding sufficient attention. Even with a strong rebranding strategy, some companies fail because they try shortcuts or pick the wrong partners to launch their new brands.
Bottom Line
Rebranding might become inevitable for businesses due to many reasons. If you face such, devising a rebranding strategy before embarking on the activity is prudent. A complete strategy is important regardless if you want to improve on what you have or looking to start from scratch.
That said if your company had rebranded before, what was your rebranding strategy? Share in the comments.
Bio: Thomas Glare is a web designer with a whole wealth of experience running into decades. He has practiced both as an IT expert and as a teacher to many computer science students. Thomas shares his knowledge through books, journals, and his website.
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