Rebranding is crucial to any company’s growth and evolution. A successful rebrand can allow businesses to stand out from their competitors, tell a compelling brand story, and even connect with new customers.
To be effective, a rebrand will need to truly reflect and embody the full spectrum of what the company stands for today – and signpost its future direction. It will also need to take account of the expectations and demands of a diverse number of internal and external audiences.
However, rebranding is a complex process that needs to be carefully planned and tested. Let’s take a look at some of the considerations that will be key to ensuring a rebrand creates value for customers, partners and employees and is sustainable for the long term.
Brand development: building on data insights
Just like any other marketing initiative, brand development should be a continual data-driven process that seeks to objectively evaluate how effective the organisation’s current branding is, while ensuring that the right message is communicated to attract the right type of customers. Data will also provide the foundational insights that ensure the organisation always adopts a ‘customer-first’ stance when building out new value propositions.
Ideally, organisations should regularly audit their marketing tech stack to ensure that the services and apps they have in place appropriately address their marketing data needs. The aim of the game should be to guarantee that the marketing team always receives the right datasets in a timely manner, so they can repeatedly assess crucial issues such as brand perceptions and industry trends.
Without these insights, organisations will be working blind when it comes to understanding how their target audiences feel about the company’s existing brand values and messages. Similarly, they risk missing out on how emerging trends and behaviours mean that brand messages will need to be refreshed to meet evolving internal and external stakeholder expectations.
By utilising tools like sentiment and share of voice as well as perception studies, organisations will be able to assess what matters most for customers and partners and determine when and how best to reinvent the brand to deliver against these needs.
Maintaining momentum: keeping pace with fast-paced change
In recent years, the world has changed fast as new ways of working, communicating and collaborating mean that audience behaviours and expectations are in a constant state of flux.
Alongside evaluating the channels and content used to engage with customers and partners, organisations should regularly assess their brand story and cultural values to ensure these are constantly aligned with fast-changing market sentiments and demands.
This should include maintaining a close eye on the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. This will prove vital for ensuring that any rebrand strategy successfully navigates around competitors and that the organisation avoids becoming just another ‘look-a-like’. The key here is to find a unique voice and vision that communicates the real value creation the organisation is able to offer all stakeholders.
To achieve this goal, marketing and rebranding teams will need to talk to line-of-business leaders from across the organisation to share opinions and ideas. It also involves re-visiting the organisation’s mission statement to see if this truly encapsulates what the organisation stands for today and whether a differentiated identity will represent a better fit for new capabilities coming down the line.
Having established the ‘who we really are now – and who we will be’ criteria, decisions can then be taken about whether a new visual and verbal identity is required and if the brand’s character and story needs to be reworked.
Finally, testing out rebrand concepts begins with an initial unveiling of the refreshed new look, identity, tone and messages to internal sponsors but it shouldn’t end there. Undertaking qualitative research with customers and partners will be critical for understanding whether a rebrand hits the mark, communicates as intended, and is appropriate for all intended audiences.
Signalling the next phase of growth
A new brand identity represents an inflection point for organisations looking to add new capabilities that will further enhance the customer experience or change how stakeholders and global markets view them. Signalling who the organisation is, what it stands for and where it is going, a successful rebrand should acknowledge that while today’s success is built on the past, new possibilities are already on the horizon.
When it comes to determining the ‘what, when, how and why’ of a rebrand strategy, today’s organisations are able to take advantage of digital marketing ecosystems that are capable of delivering more data and insights than ever before. Making it possible to focus with pinpoint accuracy on undertaking effective brand development in each and every country they operate within.
Executed well, a re-brand enables organisations to become – and remain – more relevant, more competitive and more aligned with customers. Bringing the future into sharper focus for all.
