Rebranding strategy: Where do you even begin?

Rebranding is difficult. Remember New Coke or The Hut? It's likely you don't – those brands failed miserably. If you don’t roll out your rebranding campaign with a thoughtful plan, your initiatives will most likely fall flat or worse yet, damage your image and undo the positive work you’ve done.

rebranding-strategy

First, is a rebrand right for your company?

Before diving into our rebranding strategy, it’s important you take a step back and make sure you understand why you feel your organization needs a rebrand. What are you hoping to achieve through rebranding? Rebranding is more than a name change or a new logo on your organization’s stationery. Rebranding involves your core messaging, your culture, your attitude and your approach. And it's a big commitment of time and money.

There are several reasons to rebrand. Some of the most compelling include:

You’re trying to expand, to reach new audiences
You’ve changed your focus or service offerings
You are bringing something new to the table
Your brand is dated and hasn’t evolved with your audience

Sound like you? Time to develop your rebranding strategy.

4 initial steps to kick off a solid new brand

1. Ask around internally:

Names, logos, messages and cultures are very subjective. What appeals to one person might be a total turn off for the next. For this reason, it’s critical to base your decisions on analysis and data.

So, where do you look for insight on your brand?

A good place to start is by talking to key stakeholders. This might include staff and loyal customers to take their overall temperature and find out whether they’re on board. By enlisting the help of staff and your customers, you not only leverage their ideas. You'll also remove the need to get their buy-in after you've already put in time and energy towards the rebrand.

Talk to them one-on-one so you ensure you get their honest feedback and can have a more in-depth conversation. If they don’t agree with the idea of rebranding, find out why. If they agree that it’s necessary, ask them to elaborate.

During these discussions you can also figure out which aspects you need to rebrand. You may just need a logo tweak. But you might discover it's more extensive than that; it's a whole different project scope if you need to revisit your audience, name, logo, color scheme and messaging. You'll want to know the size of the rebrand before you dive into the next steps.

2. Hold a workshop

Next, assemble key stakeholders for a rebranding workshop. The goal of the branding workshop is to identify the core identity of the organization and uncover any brand equity that may potentially be lost. If you identified multiple priorities in the previous step, focus in on one at the time. You'll likely find there will be plenty to discuss in each piece of the puzzle.

Here's a helpful slideshare from Jessica Bogart to guide your rebranding workshop.

Once you’ve conducted the workshop, be sure to review all of feedback and synthesize results to narrow down the options. You will want a shorter list for the next step so you don't get overwhelmed by feedback.

3. Conduct a survey

Now you're ready to coordinate a survey with a short list of options. Please note, this list should be short, maybe 3-5 options. Limiting the list ensures that people taking your survey won’t encounter decision fatigue.

4. Choose a small group for the final say

Once you've done your research, you're ready to get into the final decision. This is tough to do as a committee. Ultimately, one person or a very small group will need to have the final say.

When this committee has made the decision, you're ready to move forward with design and implementation.

The keys to a successful rebranding campaign are collaboration and allowing time to reflect. Through collaboration, ideas will iterate and with time, what you need in a brand will become clearer.

And you won't end up like this...