10 Lessons We Learned When Rebranding Our Business

Rebranding your business is a bit like renovating your home. Every room is a memory and there is a comfort factor attached to the existing layout. However, you must rebuild it to accommodate your family’s changing needs. While you keep the foundation, you rebuild practically everything else from the ground up.

Rebranding is a deep-rooted change to your brand where you keep what is working and change what isn't. If the foundation is good, you retain it and build an entirely different structure on top of it. 

Let's start by looking at five telltale signs that your business may need rebranding. 

5 signs that it’s time to rebrand your business

Businesses today exist in a dynamic environment. Technology innovations, economic cycles, and changing consumer demographics and perceptions are some of the disruptive influences in the marketplace. 

Hence, many brands will need to undertake a rebranding exercise from time to time to evolve, stay relevant, and thrive in this changeable environment. Rebranding allows a brand to stay relevant to its consumer base while evolving and adapting. 

1. Rebranding for an image makeover

We all know Burberry as an iconic luxury fashion brand. Its patented tartan pattern and versatile gabardine fabric have been fashion icons for over a century, and the brand was granted a royal certification by the Queen in 1955.

However, the brand had to undertake an image overhaul in the early 2000s due to negative associations. Things came to a head when several pubs in the UK refused entry to clients wearing Burberry clothes. 

To solve the problem, the company aggressively rebranded its image as a high-end luxury brand and appointed celebrities like Emma Watson to lead the makeover of its brand image. Burberry achieved the makeover without changing its design aesthetics or pricing, thereby maintaining its heritage while appealing to its target crowd. 

2. Rebranding to access new markets 

As part of their growth strategy, brands will often address a new audience both domestically and in international markets. In America, Pabst Blue Ribbon is positioned as the quintessential inexpensive hipster beer, one that’s popular with college students and blue-collar workers on a budget.

However, when the company started shipping to China, it rebranded the beer as Pabst Blue Ribbon 1844, and re-positioned it as a premium beer at $44 a bottle. The company changed the packaging, and ad campaigns pictured the product being poured into champagne flutes. 

The company’s successful rebranding strategy captured a new market while repositioning the brand. 

3. Rebranding when you outgrow your mission

Brands may need to rebrand because they have evolved beyond their original mission and scope. For instance, Culture Amp developed a product that helped employers collect and action feedback from their employees. By 2014 the product had evolved into a multi-functional platform, and the company felt that it had outgrown its original mission. 

The company rebranded itself around its revised mission statement to realign its external perception and internal mission.

4. Rebranding for an evolving market

Sometimes market evolution and disruptive changes can force a brand to rebrand itself. For the longest time IBM was considered the gold standard in the personal computer market, then along came Apple with its Mac. Do you remember those iconic Mac vs PC ads? Suddenly, PC brands needed to reinvent themselves to keep pace with the Mac, a product that consumers saw as cutting-edge.

The first commercially-available Apple computers featured colored monitors, a feature that few IBM or Intel-based machines had until Windows became popular. 

From 1998 onwards, Apple shuffled through a series of logos, all built around the iconic apple insignia. In 2014, with its place in the smartphone, laptop, and desktop markets secure, the company settled on its current logo.

Source: visme.com

Apple is a great example of a brand that periodically rebrands itself to stay ahead of the curve and to stay relevant to its consumers. 

5. Rebranding when a name is all you have

Harley Davidson has always been an iconic brand when it comes to motorcycles. However, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1985 due to cheaper Japanese imports. Japanese brands like Honda and Kawasaki were more powerful and fuel-efficient, better designed, and more affordable.

Instead of throwing in the towel, Harley Davidson embarked on a rebranding exercise built around the value of its name and heritage. The company introduced several new models that were smaller, lighter, and faster while sticking to its basic design philosophy. The brand soon reclaimed its leadership role in the segment.

Our 10 rebranding lessons

If one or more of the above signals applies to your brand, it may be time to think of rebranding. I’d now like to share some things we’ve learned while going through our own rebranding.

Successful rebrands go beyond cosmetic changes and require a revisit to all brand elements. So, you’d need to use a WYSIWYG editor to make changes to your website. Or use different images in your packaging. These are the tangible elements of your brand. You’d also need a reevaluation of elements like mission and vision, marketing strategies, pricing, messaging, and digital presence. These are the intangible elements of your brand. 

1. Ask yourself why you’re rebranding

The first step in solving a problem is to define it clearly. Ask yourself why you are investing time, effort, and money on the rebranding exercise.

Refer back to the five telltale signs and identify the reason why you’re rebranding. Clearly define the problem your brand is facing and set SMART goals of what you want to achieve through the rebranding process. SMART goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. 

The more focused your problem definition and goals are, the more benefits you will derive from your rebranding exercise.

2. Ensure that your brand tells a story

Your brand is more than the products and services you sell. It's more than the collective sum of your logo, your physical and digital presence, your people, and everything else you can think of. Your business is not a brand until it’s an emotion that resonates with your consumers. 

The easiest way to connect your brand to an emotion is to create and narrate your brand story. Does this brand story evoke an emotion in you?

"Once upon a time, there was dish soap. It was just like all the other dish soaps—except it could clean crude oil off of ducklings and save other animals from oil spills, too!"

Source: twitter.com

A well-crafted brand story allows your brand to stand out from the competition and connect at an emotional level with your audience. Dawn dishwashing soap’s branding appeals to the animal lover inside all of us while giving the brand an environmentally conscious image.

3. Has your target audience evolved? 

Let's say you launched a fashion brand ten years ago, and your target audience was the 18-24-year-old millennials. Well, ten years on, this age group now belongs to the Gen-Z. What would happen if your brand didn't evolve and rebrand itself? 

Your original audience is ten years older and has moved on from your design aesthetics, while for the Gen-Z market, your styling is dated. On one hand, you've lost your original audience. On the other hand, you haven't adapted to the needs of the new audience.

MTV is a classic example of a brand caught in this conundrum. MTV has always targeted a young demographic, but it found today's teenagers gravitating towards the likes of Buzzfeed. As part of their rebranding strategy, MTV changed their slogan from “I want my MTV” to “I am my MTV,” allowing the teens to express their individuality through uploading customized content to the MTV website.

Source: marketingweek.com

By accessing the MTV Bump platform on the website, teens can create their mini animated clips and have them aired on the channel. To further engage tech-obsessed Gen-Z teens, MTV has a strong presence on all social platforms, and its clickable Facebook content is used to capture its market’s attention. 

4. Rebrand around your vision and mission statements 

All successful and long-standing brands are built around their vision and mission statements and clearly defined brand values. Hence, rebranding is the perfect occasion to revisit these elements and ensure that the rebranding aligns with your core elements. 

Your vision statement is a snapshot of where you want your brand to be in the future. The mission statement defines your brand's business and objectives and your process to achieve these objectives. Your brand values are the distillate of your mission and vision statements. 

These three elements together form the core internal identity of your brand. Your brand communication then converts the internal identity to the brand's customer-facing identity. One of two scenarios will apply when you rebrand.

Rebranding to discover the brand's internal identity. 

This situation applies to brands launched without a clearly defined internal identity or brands that have evolved beyond their original identity. A dissonance between how the brand views itself and how the customers view the brand is a tell-tale sign of this issue. 

The solution is to define the three elements that define your internal identity. Define the vision, mission, and core values of your brand. 

Rebranding for better alignment with internal identity. 

The goal of rebranding, in this case, is to realign the brand's internal and external processes with the elements of its core identity. Start with an internal and external audit to answer the following questions: 

• Do the employees buy into the brand identity? 
• Are the internal processes across business verticals aligned with the brand identity?
• Do customer-facing elements like your messaging, customer service, and the brand logo reflect your brand identity accurately?

The answers to these questions will give you a blueprint to make the required course corrections.

5. Rebranding around mergers

Mergers and acquisitions are a fast track to inorganic growth for a brand. Rebranding becomes critical when merging two companies with distinct identities and cultures. Let's look at a case where the rebranding went wrong.

Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion in a union described as "love at first sight." On paper, it looked like a match made in heaven. The e-commerce giant got access to hundreds of physical stores while Whole Foods saw the merger as an opportunity to achieve economies of scale and thereby reverse its declining sales. 

Both companies broke the news of the merger on their ecommerce website while highlighting the benefits to their respective customers.

Source: 1010data.com

After a year, the dream had turned sour at both ends. The problem lay in forcing a merger between two companies with distinctly different brand identities and cultures. 

Amazon’s efficient services depended on a strict internal culture of discipline, cost-cutting, and productivity-driving strategies. In stark contrast, the Whole Foods identity and culture had roots in its personal touch. Employees at the store level had decision-making authority and a high degree of autonomy. 

Imposing Amazon's strict culture led to a drop in morale and sales at Whole Foods while creating frustration at the highest levels of Amazon’s leadership. This deadlock led to a deep-dive rebranding, where the best elements were taken from each brand to work out a cohesive identity. 

6. Competitive rebranding

As part of your rebranding exercise, find out your main competitors and perform a branding audit on them. Look at the current trends in branding as well. A competitive brand audit will answer the question, "Are you sufficiently differentiated from your competition?"

Is your competitive advantage cosmetic and limited to your logo and style guide? Or does the differentiation go deeper into features, benefits, and messaging. Your competitive audit will look at all elements of your competitor's branding ranging from their website to their social media platforms. 

The audit will also help in identifying and addressing your internal gaps, areas where your competition holds an edge over you. 

7. Defining your brand style guide

Rebranding is an opportunity to pay attention to the important details. One such detail is defining the style guideline for your brand. If your mission, vision, and brand values define the brand's internal identity, then your style guideline gives your brand a consistent customer-facing personality. Your style guide will also help you while redesigning your logo.

Source: 99designs.com

For a comprehensive look at each element, you can refer to this article at 99designs. Your company is more than just the products or services you sell. A well-defined style guideline gives your brand a strong and consistent personality that can be seen, heard, and felt in everything that is associated with your business. 

A strong brand personality gives you a competitive edge and gives your customer a reason to buy your brand over all the other options on the market. The style guide helps your team to communicate in a voice that is true to your brand. 

8. Get your team on board

For our rebranding effort, we formed a cross-functional core team with members from each business vertical. The team consisted of representatives from leadership, design, engineering, and marketing. Using cross-functional teams had three major benefits for us.

• Multiple ideation and feedback points
• Faster adoption timelines
• Strengthened our internal culture

The representatives on the team participated in the rebranding process and were also responsible for carrying the rebranding elements to their respective verticals and garnering feedback from their colleagues. This allowed decisions and revisions to be made in real-time with inputs from the rest of the company.

Real-time engagement across the business verticals allowed us to crash the adoption timeline to two months. If we had done the rebranding as a silo-centric activity, the adoption timeline would have stretched to six to eight months. 

The cross-functional team brought us closer as a team and as a company. It also strengthened our internal culture and helped in a collective buy-in to the rebranding. 

9. Budget your rebranding costs

Before you embark on your rebranding exercise, work out the costs involved and set a budget. The simple answer to your question, “How much will my rebranding cost?” is simply, “It depends.” 

For a start, the size of the company is a major factor in rebranding costs. Larger companies typically will spend more than smaller companies because they have more products and internal items to rebrand. The thumb rule says that your rebrand should cost you between 10-20% of your marketing budget. 

Keep in mind this is only the direct cost of rebranding. The indirect costs of taking the results of your rebranding to your customers will add a substantial amount to your investment. Let's say you are a $15 million company with a marketing budget of $750,000. Your rebrand should cost you $75-150,000 indirect costs. You can tag on another $500,000 in marketing costs to take the rebrand to your customers. 

10. Give it time - Rome wasn’t built in a day

A rebrand doesn’t happen overnight. Once you’re committed to the process, you need to allocate sufficient time while developing the rebranding blueprint, its adoption by your team, and the rollout to the customers. 

The rebranding cycle isn’t complete till you start receiving consumer feedback. Patience and perseverance are key elements of rebranding. 

After toiling long and hard, you will reach the day when you're ready to roll out your new look brand. Take pride in your efforts and communicate the changes to your customers in a transparent manner. Tell them why you have rebranded and how you went about it. Highlight the fact that despite the rebranding, the core values of the brand remain unchanged. Add this journey to your brand story. 

This process allows you to minimize the confusion and dissonance in the mind of your consumer. You can also strengthen their brand loyalty by involving them in your brand story.

In Closing

Whether your brand needs a facelift or a complete overhaul of its brand identity to keep pace with your evolution, rebranding is instrumental in molding your stakeholders’ and customers’ perception of your business and products. 

The value drivers lie both in the process as well as in the end result. Rebranding is a rare opportunity to strengthen and reaffirm your company’s internal identity and align it with the brand's customer-facing personality. It is an opportunity to share your brand values internally with your employees and externally with your customers.

To get the most out of your rebranding campaign, you need to understand why you are rebranding and take your cue from our learning for a smoother rebranding experience.