The Why and How of Rebranding Your Business

Your brand is your story. It connects people to who you are and your values. Your brand expresses what you do to elevate others’ lives. Organizations and businesses grow and change over time. It’s a given. It’s also a given that branding follows suit. That’s why most organizations need to rebrand: to stay modern, stay relevant, stay effective.

There are several reasons why your organization should rebrand. Maybe you are trying to attract new business, entering a new market segment, setting yourself apart from the competition, need to stay current, expanding your operations, or have a poor reputation.

A proper rebranding strategy can help your organization thrive. It’s a mistake to under-invest in branding because you think it’s nothing more than a name and logo. A successful brand includes your customers’ total experiences with your organization.

If you find your brand identity is undermining your growth efforts, it’s time to rebrand. Please keep reading to learn more about business rebranding, strategies, and how to go about it.

What is brand awareness?

Brand awareness is how well your target audience recognizes your brand and its products. Ideally, brand awareness includes the qualities that distinguish your products and services from the competition. Brand awareness is essential because it’s the first step in your marketing funnel and a crucial foundation for acquiring customers.

Establishing brand awareness is key to marketing and promoting your business and products, especially when launching new products, reviving an older brand, or entering a new market segment.

Successful brand awareness can embed your business or organization into consumer purchase habits and lifestyles, so they don’t think twice before becoming customers — time and time again.

You can use several strategies to achieve and increase your brand awareness. These include:

• Marketing your brand on social media platforms
• Giving your brand a personality
• Using influencer marketing
• Using content marketing to generate organic traffic back to your website
• Creating referral programs
• Creating more video marketing content
• Focusing equally on online and offline campaigns

Additionally, below are a few ways to measure your brand awareness:

• Do surveys via email, telephone, or website
• Use Google trends data
• Look at your website traffic
• Look at your search volume data
• Use social listening
• Check your social media followers
• Use brand tracking software

Businesses with excellent brand awareness enjoy increased customer trust and loyalty, increased credibility, lower price sensitivity, high sales and revenue, etc.

What’s the reason for rebranding?

Companies need to continually evolve to remain competitive, including redeveloping their brand and branding strategy. Rebranding can occur for several reasons, such as:

• You no longer love your logo, name, or design, or you believe your current brand aesthetic no longer speaks to your organization’s values and products.
• You’re thinking of expanding your business scope to enter a new market, and your existing name is too limiting.
• You realized your brand is not doing a good enough job differentiating you in the marketplace.

Most companies, including some of the most successful brands, rebrand. Rebranding can work wonders for any organization struggling to modernize, escape a lackluster reputation, or differentiate itself from the competition.

What are the benefits of rebranding?

Rebranding is an excellent way to shake things up and change your target market if you feel your business isn’t appealing to the customers you want. It’s a great way for businesses and organizations to stimulate growth, expand, gain a competitive advantage, increase profits, and strengthen their workforce.

However, don’t assume that rebranding will solve internal problems or new management changes. It takes effort and time, so the changes may occur over an extended period, not right away. Before rebranding, ensure you have the time, innovation, workforce, and resources to pull it off smoothly.

When Should You Rebrand?

Companies should consider rebranding when the business needs a refresh. Most companies will opt to rebrand once every seven to ten years to grow and strengthen their external appearance.

The right rebranding strategy infuses new energy into your business or organization, but it should complement your overall business and marketing strategies. Below are reasons to consider rebranding:

• To differentiate your organization from the competition. Avoid generic branding, because it makes it difficult to differentiate your brand from others with identical logos, colors, and designs.
• To give a new life to your outdated branding. Businesses need to continually evolve to compete favorably in the modern business climate and avoid losing market share. Therefore, modernizing your brand image allows you to turn your business around and accelerate its growth.
• To outgrow your original mission, especially when your customer profile changes or you start offering a different line of products.
• To turn around a poor reputation, help consumers see you in a new light and regain your brand loyalty. The aim here is to turn your negative brand recognition into a neutral or positive one.
• To target new markets or expand your product offerings, increasing your market share. Your new prospects and customers should connect with your brand.
• Realign your changing organization’s mission, vision, and values with your brand, since they should govern every business decision you make.
• After a merger and acquisition, combine two brands to create a new brand identity, develop new brand recognition, build trust, and prevent confusion.
• To create a strong brand identity when expanding to international markets.

When should rebranding be avoided?

Rebrands are complicated and carry significant risks. Knowing these risks can help determine whether or not you should go ahead with your rebrand. For example, you should reconsider if you want to rebrand because your business sales or subscriptions have dipped, and your brand awareness efforts don’t seem to pay off. Instead, you can solve such issues by conducting market research to find the underlying problem or creating a new marketing strategy.

However, a rebrand may be the right decision if you wish to reintroduce your business because your brand no longer reflects your organization’s vision, mission, values, culture, and market.

Here are a few reasons not to rebrand:

• Boredom with your existing brand is never a good enough reason to rebrand, since your customers might love your signature logo, color, and design.
• The need for new management to leave a mark and show that the organization is taking a new direction is not a good enough reason to rebrand. It rarely works unless the rebrand includes significant institutional changes to reflect the new direction.
• Attempt to cover up a crisis, internal issues, or fend off bad press. Most employees and consumers will recognize the rebranding strategy as a cover-up.
• Attempt to look for attention due to floundering sales or slow brand awareness. It might generate some short-term buzz but lack the marketing strategy and sales to sustain it.

8 Effective rebranding strategies

Below are eight rebranding strategies to follow:

Determine your existing and new identity

Start the rebranding process by taking a close look at your organization. Find out what is running smoothly and what needs changing. Also, consider your organization’s culture, mission, vision, and values before deciding what changes to make.

Talking to your employees and customers about their concerns and opinions is one of the best ways to determine what changes to make in your rebrand. It’s also advisable to research your target market to determine how much the industry has changed since you started, and where you fit into it.

Change your logo and shift your brand positioning

Changing your logo is one of the primary strategies of rebranding. The new logo communicates the change in your brand identity. Next, shift your brand positioning to ensure your marketing content communicates the new message (mission, values, and vision).

Audit the changes you wish to make

Document every change you wish to make. Additionally, ensure all your employees and stakeholders understand the changes and your rebranding goals.

Check your plan of action and determine when the different changes will occur. Also, list the marketing parts that need updating, such as logos, signs, social media, websites, invoices, etc. You can also research your competition for some inspiration.

Research your consumers

Look at your customer base and decide if you wish to target a new market as part of your overhaul. Appealing to a new demographic could help your bottom line and change the overall vibe of your business to keep it location-fresh and exciting.

Turn employees into brand ambassadors

Include your employees in the rebranding process to get them excited and invested. Your brand identity will tie into your company culture, which your employees should be the first to promote. In addition, turning employees into brand ambassadors is an inexpensive way to market your new brand.

Create new ads

Create new marketing content advertisements with the new message in mind. The ads should communicate your brand changes and appeal to new target audiences.

Change your brand voice

Ensure you change your brand’s voice to reflect the changes you want to make. It’s essential to announce your rebrand in a new voice (whether it’s formal, casual, witty, etc.).

Initiate the changes and communicate your new brand identity

Before launching, ensure your managers and employees are up to speed and comfortable with the changes, and that they live up to the new brand identity. Next, announce your official launch date on your marketing channels and convey your new brand identity to the marketplace.

How to rebrand a company

How do you go about rebranding your organization or company? A successful rebrand process requires successful planning and execution. So let’s walk through the process.

Reestablish your brand’s market, audience, and competition

Always do your due diligence before rebranding. Research what your competition does and determine your unique value proposition. Look at who is buying from you and who others are buying from instead of you.

Your new brand image should be fresh and relevant. First, test your rebranding assets with your target audience and customer base through focus groups to get their feedback. After establishing your actual audience and market, you can go ahead with the rebranding process.

Redefine your mission, vision, and values

Understanding your organization’s mission, vision, and values is crucial before rebranding. Consider what makes you unique, why you exist, and what values are essential to you. Additionally, your brand voice should match your messaging and company culture. These three form the foundation to build your new brand.

Come up with a complete rebranding strategy

A total rebrand is more straightforward, because you toss everything out and start from scratch. However, organizations doing a partial rebrand cannot begin from a clean slate. Instead, they need to consider their existing brand assets when rebranding. Hence, the need for a solid rebranding strategy.

Collaborate with your team

Your rebranding strategy should include the voices and opinions of your employees. Including input from your employees could turn them into enthusiastic brand ambassadors.

Rename your organization

Changing your organization’s name is a huge undertaking that could cost you hard-earned organic traffic and brand recognition in one fell swoop. Therefore, ensure you have a recovery strategy after renaming your organization. Otherwise, if your name still fits, keep it.

Some starter ideas for new, unique brand names include: Making a new word, using old words in new ways, modifying a word’s spelling, adding a prefix or suffix, creating an acronym, using a location, or looking to other languages.

Rebuild your brand identity

When rebranding, it’s good to redesign your logo, use a new slogan, change the colors in your brand material, and create new brand guidelines. Here are some changes to consider making:

• Logo: A new logo reflects the changes you have made internally. Some basics for redesigning your logo include: stay simple, make an impact, aim for appropriate, and look to the long term.
• Colors: Colors significantly impact your brand and can become synonymous. Selecting the right color for your rebrand can be challenging. However, competitor research and color psychology can help you find the best color for your new brand.
• Typography: Changing your font may also be essential when rebranding. Remember to remain consistent with the markets, demographics, marketing channels, and messages you uncovered while rebranding.
• Shapes and Imagery: Any changes to your shapes and imagery should remain consistent with your other visual elements.

In line with your rebranding strategy, other changes include your official website, business cards, product packaging and graphics, illustration, email design, personality, voice, and slogan.

Manage the rebrand carefully

Your rebrand should be a well-managed and smooth process from start to finish. Therefore, set deadlines and mitigate any issues to make the process successful.

Launch your rebrand

A carefully planned rebrand launch and marketing strategy minimize the risk of customer confusion. Additionally, be ready to explain why you rebranded, and choose a narrative that your customers can understand and appreciate to elicit excitement and curiosity.

Call us when it’s time to rebrand your business

A business rebrand gives your organization a chance to revamp and refresh its primary touchpoints with its customers. It’s a declaration of your commitment to upward growth. But change is never easy, so it’s best to use the right rebranding strategy and process to ensure success.

So are you ready to rebrand? Whether you redesign your website or logo, rename your organization, or do a complete rebrand, this article can help you consider your best strategy moving forward. At Big Sea, we’re rooting for you! We are your go-to professional partner for all your digital marketing needs. Contact us today!