Rebranding typically aims towards repositioning of a brand of the corresponding organization. Name, logo, website design, and voice are the elements that come under rebranding.
It’s a big decision and organizations have to analyze and forecast the impact of changing an already established brand. For ignorant about such facts will prove disastrous for their business. As said before, it’s not celebratory move, even bigger brands adopt the rebranding technique based on numerous grounds.
Purpose of Rebranding
To start with, it’s not easy to create or develop a brand. So, when an organization decides to leave behind a name or logo there should some solid reasons for such bold initiatives.
Typical reasons –
- To evolve and innovate along with the competitive brands.
- The target audience may have started alienating from your brand.
- To reach the younger demographic, who are the drivers of the digital market.
- If there was merger or acquisition.
- When the previous brand efforts stop giving those valuable results.
Now you should be clear about why organizations rebrand. Let’s go through few solid brand examples that successfully performed the rebranding campaign.
Brands that totally nailed rebranding are,
OLD
NEW
Source: Wikipedia/Apple/Starbucks
There are more to add to the list if you start a research, but let’s not proceed further on that but continue our way and learn more about the rebranding process.
A Step-By-Step Approach for Rebranding
- Find out the purpose behind your Brand
- A brand is something that instantly allows people to recall about a business organization they had associated with (if they had).
- – What is the purpose of your brand?
- – How different is your brand from the rest?
- – How will your organization benefit customers?
- Finding answers to these questions will make it easier to create a brand strategy that fine tunes with the business objectives.
- Find out why the Previous Brand Failed
- Why do brands fail?
- A brand built on deceptions, do fail. And most of the times that reason would turn out because of,
- – Over-marketing
- – Not being with the trend/lack of change (best example: Nokia)
- – Poor product, bad service
- – Brand megalomania (Expanding into every product category)
- – Brand obsolescence (Irrelevancy)
- – Failing to deliver what had been promised
- Conduct Research on Target Audience
- Given the fact that your brand already failed to reach the target audience, it becomes quite clear why we need to define the target audience.
- It is similar to writing a post letter to someone who you don’t know. So it’s kind of mutual if you don’t get the right kind of feedback that you are expecting of.
- Either use conventional methodologies or powerful online tools such as Survey Monkey or learn more about your target audience.
- Learn about their interests and focus your energy towards building a brand that clearly addresses and reflects the audience preferences.
- Creating a Fluid Brand
- As the time progresses, the brand should also be flexible to take into the changes.
- The best way to understand the fluid concept is, let’s say you are marketing about a PC and speak individually to each of the audience group giving them the same message but through different ways.
- Similarly, a brand should be flexible, and not a static billboard to effectively reach the fragmented audience group.
- Make sure all the Brand Elements are Singing the Same Story
- What are brand elements?
- We will get into that wait, but do you know the art of building a professional brand?
- If you know about color psychology or the importance of using professional typography then definitely it will be easier to create a brand that connects both emotionally and professionally.
- Your logo becomes the ‘object of desire’ once every element defines the same story about your organization.
- Consistent & Continuous Brand Promotion
- How to tell people that you have rebranded your organization?
- How to make them realize that it is you and not some new brand?
- It’s quite simple,
- Promote continuously and consistently.
- Larger the reach and longer the campaign, effective will the response for your brand.
Some Valuable Advice
Don’t touch a brand that is already helping your business.