A Few Lessons For Young Communicators From the Urban Icon Rebranding

Recently, I had the opportunity to present to a group of 2nd year college students majoring in Communications at Paramadina University. While the presentation was initially geared toward talking about fascinating journey that we undertook to re-brand Urban Icon (and in fact, it's still ongoing), eventually I came around to trying to bring to the students some general lessons in communications strategy on a more general level. Truth be told, many communications professional I come across seem to have a "one size fits all" approach to how they communicate. The implication is that if they had to do ten re-brandings, they would probably end up with the same result ten times, and in nine of those cases, the re-brand would fail because they failed to look at each case differently.

So in looking at this I told them that the fundamental reason for a re-brand is really only founded on two goals: to gain market share or to gain customer and employee love. The market share one is generally a false choice. A re-brand in the social media age will rarely work if your main goal is just to get more money without putting a soul behind your brand. A re-brand with the goal of gaining "customer love" (marketers I guess call this mindshare and loyalty) is something altogether different. But even then, your approach will depend a lot on how much love and loyalty you have from your customer. Just because you work for a company and you have high market share doesn't mean you have customer love, nor vice versa. Size comes out of strong business fundamentals whereas love comes out of a mission that endears you to your customer.

In the end, I left the students with a few takeaways:

1. Be honest (and I mean truly honest) with yourself about where your brand sits. Does it have a strong, guiding set of values and are your customers willing to take the time to make comments about your service and to talk about you (positively or even negatively) via social media and in their day-to-day conversations. Size is very easy to measure objectively and without bias, customer love is very much not so easy to do the same.
2. Marketing by itself very rarely makes a considerable difference unless you have an ample budget to splash your name everywhere. For a re-brand to work, you need to embrace it at every level of the organization, particularly at the point where you customer interacts with your team. And equally important, at the point where your team members interact with their managers.
3. There is no one template to solve every brand problem. It depends on so many factors that you can't simply take a cookie-cutter approach to every problem. Our success at say Urban Icon might give a few ideas to a manager trying their own re-brand, but the latter would still have to solve 80% of the puzzle in a different way.
4. The first step to solving a problem is to admit you have one. I can't say enough how important it is for an organization to have at least a few leaders who are a bit cynical. These people will invariably take an honest approach that will force you to work toward incremental change instead of just patching up the same basic situation.
5. "Great" and "Big" are two entirely different things. Just because you're big doesn't make you great. And some of the greatest companies aren't necessarily the biggest. However, being great makes getting bigger and staying there a whole lot easier.

I'll get into a few stories about our Urban Icon re-brand later, but in the meantime, I would love to hear your comments and insights on this article so feel free to drop me a line.