This Week I Learned: How to Rebrand
And it’s not as simple as making a cool logo
This article originally appeared on my Medium publication, This Week I Learned, a collection of skills, tools, news, and realizations that I pick up every week.
Imagine if you’re in an organization that doesn’t have a great brand. People on the outside aren’t particularly excited about the organization, and the people on the inside all have different perceptions about the company’s brand.
So, to refresh the brand, all they have to do is get a new logo and spruce up the website, right?
Not quite. Most people think that’s the case, but making a new logo and website to change a company’s brand is like a slapping a Band-Aid on an actively bleeding wound. As it turns out, rebranding is a much more thorough process. And, at the end of it, the organization will be better off both internally and externally.
This week, I’ll tell you about how I learned the rebranding process.
As I found out, there are plenty of resources on how to rebrand out there. Through a bit of trial and error, I compiled a rough list that details the process from start to finish on how to do a brand reboot.
Here’s the general process:
- Do a brand audit
- Research the company, target customers, and competitors
- Define positioning and messaging strategy
- Build the brand identity
- Develop the brand building strategy
- Implement the brand building strategy
Brand Audit. It’s essentially just an assessment of current brand assets. Internally, that could mean that you’re evaluating positioning, brand values, brand voice, culture, and such. Externally, that could mean that you’re looking at logos, the website, collateral, videos, content marketing, social media, and things like that. Once you’ve gathered all that, you’re just trying to figure out what the brand currently looks like, how well the different pieces of your brand fit together, and where you want to go. If you want to learn more, I also found a helpful DIY brand audit guide by Miles Herdon.
Research the company, target customers, and competitors. This is where you find out what people think of the brand and organization. The goal is to have an objective understanding of your current brand perception and core competencies. You could potentially interview current employees, executives, past clients, and more. You’ll also research the market and try to understand the positioning of other brands in the space and where your brand could fit.
Define positioning and messaging strategy. Now that you have all of the information, you can now define, or redefine, the positioning and messaging of the company. Is the company a high end, custom service shop? Is the company a mass-market, low-end affordable solution? What does your company stand for? What are the attributes of the brand? What’s written here will form the backbone of all marketing messaging from here on out.
Build the brand identity. Now that the messaging is set, it’s time to define what it means conceptually and visually. The brand identity portion of the process is where you develop all of the visual identity of the brand. Think names, logos, taglines, fonts, color palettes, business cards, stationary, pitch decks, brand books, and more. Once that’s finished, this can expand to other parts of the brand, including the website, social media, and things like that. There’s a great case study done by Pentagram on First Round Capital that explains the brand identity portion of the process fairly well.
Develop the brand building strategy. Once the foundation has been laid, now it’s time to build the brand. There’s more than a couple different ways to do this, and it all depends on what the company is comfortable with and what makes sense for the brand. A popular strategy nowadays is content marketing, which involves producing a steady stream of content aimed to educate the audience, which usually consists of potential clients, customers, or users. Another powerful strategy that has become more or less dominant today is social media, which can exponentially grow a brand if done correctly. A less volume-driven strategy is the high profile customer/client model, where the brand focuses on landing a single name-brand client to boost their entire brand and credibility forward (this makes more sense for service companies). Whatever it is, create the plan and follow through.
Implement the brand building strategy. Now go execute on that plan.
And that’s the general process for doing a brand reboot.
Now, some people will want to ask, “Is there really a need for all of this process? Can I just do an MVP (minimal viable product) version of this rebrand and spend less time and money?”
Yes. That may work for some people. However, when conducting a rebrand, it’s important to realize that a couple of new shiny logos and colors are not going to solve systemic problems. If the company employees disagree on the values of the company, then it won’t work. If the users/customers of the company have completely different views of the brand, then it won’t work. All you would be doing is delaying the date in which you would have to do a rebrand, which in most cases just creates more work later.
Another question people may have is this: "What’s the ROI of a rebrand?"
Well, it depends on the organization. You can conduct a brand audit before and after a rebrand to see what systems were improved and what got better. You can also just do the math. For example, if you pay an agency (like mine) to do the rebrand, how many new customers/clients/users would you have to get in order to justify the costs? In the case of many of my clients that are professional services companies, they generally only have to win one or two new clients to justify the costs.
If you want to see what the rebrand process looks like for the organization as opposed to the one implementing the rebrand, then check out this awesome Medium article by Asana about their rebranding process.
That’s it for today. If you ever have any suggestions for what I should write about, just comment below and I’ll check it out.
Look out for the next article in a week!
-Indra
-Atlanta, 2017