Rebranding Playbook: Setting a up plan, vision, and strategy for success.

Start-ups are motivated, mentored, engineered and expected to move fast. Oftentimes new companies are so focused on growth targets (and keeping the lights on) they rarely have time to stop and look inward.

By the time you know it, years have zoomed past. The business has grown, the product and customers have evolved. And you and your team could find yourself asking “is this really who we are?”.

Rebranding is a time for introspection and is a mindfulness opportunity. One where a business can look inward to discover its true self, and course-correct to best reflect that truth back to the world.

Much like the many forms of meditation, it can feel overwhelming at first. Not knowing what to do, if you’re doing it right–or even where to start. Consider this your introductory guide to brand introspection to build the creative confidence required to tackle a rebrand.

Since rolling out tentree’s new branding, we are often asked about the process from friends and other industry professionals. I’ve found myself repeating answers to several questions and decided to share some advice for others seeking to make the jump into a new brand.

In this article, you will learn the process and key steps tentree took to launch a successful rebrand.

Below is a case study of sorts, outlining the scope of the project and steps taken to execute on updating tentree’s brand, first established in 2012.

Rebrand Timeline (9 months)

1. Audit — 2 months
2. Strategy — 2 Month
3. Alignment — 1 Month
4. Execution — 2 Months
5. Rollout — 2 Months

Audit

We felt in our gut for many years we should consider updating our brand, but it never got further than that. What we never did, was stop and ask why should we rebrand? Laying out the facts and state of union made things easier to collectively decide first if rebranding is worth it or not. Essentially the goal with an audit is to validate, or disprove your gut feeling.

In our case, we had spent over six years with our initial branding and familiarized with a few pain points. The key was getting these on paper, and visualizing them for stakeholders.

We created a self-prescribed evaluation focusing mainly on the core visual elements that made up our brand. Next we took a microscope to each brand facet, and we were objective about how, and most importantly, why each item needs an update. Hint: it needs to be a better reason than “it doesn’t look good anymore”. Collectively assessing your brand makes things very objective, it removes the emotional attachment to the brand and focuses on facts–helping improve the speed of decision-making.

Here are the core elements we narrowed our audit down to: Name, Logo, Tagline, Colors, Typography, Icons, Positioning, Tone & voice, Brand Values etc.

I’ve provided a simple example of auditing our tagline which is essentially a form of SWOT analysis we exersized on each item.

Our Tagline: “ten trees are planted for every item sold”

What have we done to date?

Tagline Example: We selected a consistent tagline to communicate our brand promise: “ten trees are planted for every item purchased”

What works?

Tagline Example: When it comes to internal marketing communications we have minimized mixed taglines stating our brand promise. e.g. each vs. every, purchased vs. sold

What doesn’t Work?

Tagline Example: Third parties and customers still confuse our tagline “every item vs. each item.”

Contains the phrase “ten trees” which could lead new customers to think we are “ten trees” rather than “tentree”

It is rather long, ideally a tagline is 3–5 words.

What could we do about it?

Tagline Example: We could look to simplify our tagline to minimize misspellings. e.g., Every item plants ten. Buy one, plant ten.

Verdict

Tagline Example: Given the number of misspellings of our brand name, and confusion around precise terminology of our tagline, we should consider simplifying our tagline to ensure it does not include the phrase “ten trees” which could confuse our brand name.

Strategy

For startups and small brands, the most important and most often overlooked step is brand strategy. I can’t stress more the importance of strategy before diving into creative work.

Strategy is your brand’s GPS, guiding where you are headed.

Not knowing where your brand is headed, is like getting in a car without a destination in mind. It may sound fun for the adventurous–but for a growing company, you’ll need to set a clear and concise destination.

Developing brand strategy can vary dramatically depending on the size and budget of the company. There are also many formats and frameworks to do it. Regardless of how you tackle it, these are some questions brand strategy should help answer:

• What is your brand vision?
• What is your reason for existing?
• What are the reasons to believe in your mission?
• What real problem are you solving?
• What customer are you attracting?
• What is the cultural narrative or human truth in relation to your brand?
• What is your organizing idea, or unifying idea?
• What are your brand values?

At the core, your strategy must be rooted in human truth. And it is important you validate that this “truth” is correct and not a hunch. Strategy’s job is to increase your odds of being correct–and provide your team with the ability to make the right choices for your company within their own domain.

To validate your human truth, you can ask these kinds of questions:

Is it desirable? Can consumers rally behind it, can they emotionally attach themselves to it?

Is it feasible? Does the current state of technology, or cultural landscape support it.

Is it viable? Will it actually work, can it generate profit, solve a problem, generate an emotion etc.

Think about what facts would need to support each of these statements. “What would need to be true to prove X?”

Answers to these questions must be research and insight-based. Unfortunately, there is no bulletproof playbook for building brand strategy. It takes hours of quantitative/qualitative research, soul-seeking, and creative insight to discover your truth. Some tools we have used are:

• Brand Positioning Maps
• VALS framework
• 12 Brand Archetypes
• Empathy Mapping

Your goal should be to distil your brand strategy into a single, unifying idea. The unifying idea is something that every person in the company can rally behind, and use generate ideas on how to act and make decisions within their department/role.

Here’s an example of tentree’s unifying idea: “big change starts small”

“We believe in the power of small, individual acts and their power to add up to something big. We empower our employees, our supporters and the world to do their part, whether it’s meatless Monday or buying sustainable products that plant trees.”

You should also walk away with a very clear and concise elevator pitch tying it all together. A very simple formula, and popular amongst brand people is the Elevator Pitch Template, from Crossing the Chasm by Geoffry Moore:

1. For (target customers)

2. Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative)

3. Our product is a (new product category)

4. That provides (key problem-solving capability).

5. Unlike (the product alternative),

6. Our product (describe the key product features).

Here’s a modified example of how tentree’s would look.

For people who want to help the planet but feel overwhelmed by the size of the task: tentree is an Earth-first apparel brand that plants trees for every item sold and celebrates the little individual acts that add up to big collective change.

Criteria

In order to provide creative direction and and make objective decisions, there must be criteria for your rebrand. Criteria helps define success of the project by creating a list of brand problems to solve (objective), versus trying to make things visually look better (subjective).

Criterion are an individual problem you will look to solve through the rebrand process.

Our criteria were created by running a brand audit from top to bottom. We looked at all of the brand touch points across departments and media. Qualitative research was done through internal questionnaires Collaborating with department leads helped narrow down key issues that kept coming up.

Here a few examples of some of our rebrand criteria:

Symbol

Our “10” looked too much like “IO” — Sales feedback spurred from our growth into Europe, where it was important we make ourselves clear in a new market.

The tree was too detailed — The product team was unable to reproduce the logo on small embroidery or prints because of its detail.

Tagline

We wanted a shorter, simpler tagline that said “tree” instead of “trees”, to minimize the confusion of our brand name: “tentree” vs. “tentrees”.

Wordmark

We never really invested much brand equity into a wordmark. This meant when it came to branding arsenal, our options were limited exclusively to our logo. Our sales team really wanted to expand our branded product offering with a wordmark, but also put more effort on getting our brand name out versus just our “10” logo.

Brand Name

Incorrect spelling of our name — Our Ecomm team had reported many misspellings of our brand name in search terms, “10tree”, “Ten Tree” vs. “tentree”. We needed to find a way to make this more clear.

Alignment

Alignment is the oil on the gears of progress. Without it, you will crawl to a stop and most likely have to go back and do maintenance or repair to get you back on track. If anything I’ve learned in over a decade of creative work—the key to any project’s success is getting alignment between stakeholders, building momentum and moving forward.

If you noted during the criteria section, almost every line item in our ask was co-created by another department within the company. We essentially created an alignment checklist that ticked a box for each key stakeholder.

Strategy and criteria are integral to the process as they both rely on departmental alignment. By making the creative process objective, decisions can be made faster as they rely on objective inputs versus subjective. Creative teams never want to be caught defending work subjectively, or in simpler terms, because “it looks better” to them — it’s an uphill fight.

Take the path of least resistance, by including your stakeholders in the process and make a point to consistently refer back to the strategy and the criteria, this makes a much stronger case to rationalize decisions and gets your team excited about the progress that is being made to solve brand problems you collectively set out at the beginning.

Execution

After all the theoretical work is done it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Whether you plan to execute the rebrand yourself or hire a team, the execution process will be similar. Whether you’re working with an agency or doing it in-house the steps should generally stay within these goalposts:

• Concept
• Revision
• Refinement
• Handoff

The number of concepts and revisions will vary based of course on your timeline, budget and the outcome of the work.

Be prepared for an emotional roller coaster. I’m convinced the process of rebranding mirrors the five stages of grief. It’s perfectly normal to find yourself in this seemingly infinite loop:

“Why are we even doing this? This was a mistake! Wait. I love it! It’s ok… I hate it–No! I love it.”

One thing to consider during this process is to include outside perspective once you start honing in on things that resonate. We get so caught up in our own world that we tend to see things differently than others, with sometimes even a narrower lens. Here’s an example of what I mean:

We’re certainly all familiar with the brand Bumble, but maybe not the story of how they got their name. At first Whitney Wolfe hated the name someone suggested: “Bumble”. And her eyes rolled. It wasn’t until she heard the perspective of an outside voice that helped her rationalize what she thought was garbage, was golden. Bumble represented the community, queen bee, women in charge, etc. These were not obvious to her at first, as she had likely looked through thousands of names, evaluating them all for different reasons.

Be open to things that don’t jump out to you at first, or things you might not “get” right away. It’s good to let your thoughts marinate over a period of time. Or as I like to do, give it the “overnight test” — Sleep on it. If you wake up the next day and feel the same way, it likely says something.

Rollout

Depending on your type of business, your rollout will vary. In our case we work on physical products almost two years in advance. This makes for a tricky transition as most things are signed off, ordered and in production many months before they arrive at retail. With this in mind, it is critical to build a work-back (or GANTT chart) calendar for every department within the organization.

In our case, we leveraged the assistance of a project manager to ensure every department had clearly communicated their timelines and drop-dead dates to integrate the new branding.

As it was nearly impossible to launch our new branding all at once, we had to create a phased approach. We were realistic in our expectations that it would not be a perfect launch, I can’t stress enough how critical this is. You may think it’s the end of the world, but the average consumer likely won’t notice or care.

Closing thoughts

???♀? It’s only a rebrand.

Good brands create an emotional bond with their customers, and chances are you are just as emotionally attached as some customers. It’s natural to feel like your brand is precious and fragile, but here’s the truth: There will be people who love it, people who hate, and people who don’t even notice. After the dust settles, what matters most is that you executed on your criteria and made things easier, and better for your team and customers.

?? Collaboration is Queen

Without getting buy-in from others, your project is doomed to cause friction and create delays. There are many steps in the process where collaboration is critical. The goal is not to design by committee, but resolve by committee. Put in the work at front-end to ensure your teams needs are being met and it will make this process so much easier, trust me.

?? Rebranding is a process, not an event.

There’s no flicking a switch and becoming a new brand. Don’t expect perfection, it’s simply not possible. In our digital era, There are far too many moving parts for this to be possible. Think of the process as a sunset, even after the sun dips below the horizon, it’s light still fills the sky hours after the sun has left