Earlier this year, we talked about the idea of rebranding your company at certain points over its lifespan. In this article, we’ll dig in to five key rebranding steps and provide examples of organizations that have navigated the process with great success, as well as those that fell short. Here are some important actions for a successful rebrand.
1. Determine the issue
There are a million reasons a business might fall short of its anticipated goals and overall performance. Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make is assuming that a rebranding is all it will take to get things back on track. Rebranding shouldn’t be seen as a magic bullet that will dissipate the underlying issues running through your organization.
Take RadioShack’s infamously disastrous attempt at rebranding itself as “The Shack” back in 2009. After watching its business decline over the years, RadioShack attempted to revamp its image—but largely neglected the important step of creating more value for customers as part of the process. In the end, it didn’t work. While the company is still in operation, it’s far from the retail powerhouse it once was.
RadioShack’s decline can be attributed to two key factors:
Overall, the company failed to evolve its services to meet the needs of the modern consumer. While RadioShack made some changes to its operations, they didn’t provide enough value to maintain its market relevance with the company’s target audience. As with “The Shack” idea, RadioShack made surface-level changes to its branding—but these superficial attempts made it obvious that the rebranding was just a ploy to stay relevant.
Rebranding involves making impactful upgrades to your offering in addition to aesthetic transformations. Neglect this step, and you’ll end up doing more harm than good to your company’s reputation.
2. Solidify your mission statement and value proposition
One of the core reasons for rebranding is communicating your organization’s mission statement clearly. In order to do this, you need to have a solidly defined mission statement. Without this crucial piece of the puzzle, you could fall into making changes that have little to no positive impact on your business. In developing and revamping your mission statement, there are a couple of things to consider:
First, think about what your company brings to the table—specifically focusing on how it outperforms the competition. As time goes on, you’ll gain a better understanding of how your brand stands out from others in your industry. Use this knowledge to your advantage.
You’ll also want to define how and why your value proposition and mission have evolved to begin with. If your rebranding efforts aren’t backed by solid evidence and rationale, chances are these efforts aren’t going to lead to the growth you’re seeking. To illustrate how a brand’s mission statement and value proposition can change over time, look to the company formerly known as Weight Watchers—now branded WW, or “Wellness that Works.”
While the original purpose of the Weight Watchers company was to help clients lose weight, its focus is now on guiding customers toward an overall healthier lifestyle. The aesthetic rebranding is a part of this, but their revamped mission statement is a more substantial element of their evolution.
For your rebranding initiative to lead to growth, you need to have a clear idea of how the initiative aligns with your mission statement.
3. Align your messaging with your audience’s expectations
Your mission statement and value proposition must align with the needs and expectations of your target audience. But beyond just communicating these messages to your audience, you need to make sure customers will embrace the new branding. Your first order of business is to dig into your customer data—and begin generating even more feedback from your target audience. There are several ways to do this:
- Conduct surveys and solicit product/service reviews
- Facilitate focus groups and live interviews
- Analyze and assess real-world customer engagements with your brand
In some cases, you’ll make projections for future needs and expectations based on pre-rebrand customer engagements. In others, you’ll predict the impact of rebranding by presenting hypothetical situations to your customers. Regardless, the idea is to know with relative certainty that your efforts are on the right track in terms of engaging and providing value to your audience. Take Banz Carewear’s recent rebranding efforts. After conducting significant research on its audience’s true needs, Banz underwent a makeover that changed the formerly product-focused brand to a more value-focused one:
Post-transformation, the company focuses on parenthood and child safety. We see these values in the revamped logo and imagery, and in the safety-related info provided on the packaging.
While improving your product or service is essential for effective rebranding, you also need to market these changes in a way that matters most to customers.
4. Identify what needs to change
So far, we’ve talked about rebranding as if it requires a core overhaul of nearly everything your organization stands for. While this might be needed in some cases, it’s not necessarily the case for others. Uber and Airbnb, for example, both redesigned their logos in recent years:
Neither of these redesigns were made arbitrarily. Both Uber’s and Airbnb’s teams took a scientific and data-driven approach in creating logos more representative of their respective brands.
Uber’s redesigned logo, for example, is all about readability and approachability:
Airbnb’s revamped logo symbolically represents what their audience gains from their service:
There are cases, however, that require a complete rebranding.
Case in point: GameStop.
Facing significant declines in brick-and-mortar engagement and sales, this once-dominant video game retailer shuttered hundreds of stores in recent years. But rather than calling it quits, the company took to revamping its customer experience. Potential plans involve using physical locations to host gaming tournaments or offering retro gaming experiences to new and veteran gamers alike.
Rebranding is a broad term that means different things to different companies in different situations. Whether making relatively minor tweaks or completely overhauling your company’s value proposition, it’s essential that all changes aim to better engage and serve your customers.
5. Make immediate and gradual changes
Depending on what you’re restructuring, some changes might need a shorter time period to go live for immediate impact. With other rebranding concepts, you may want to ease your audience into the changes to avoid alienating or confusing them. Remember WW’s sudden rebranding efforts? In hindsight, many of Weight Watchers’ formerly satisfied customers felt like the brand was moving away from the service they’d known and loved for years.
There’s no one way to do this; it all depends on why you’re rebranding.
For instance, when IHOP (temporarily) rebranded to IHOb, they provided loyal customers adequate time to prepare for the change to come. While the initiative was successful, it may have prompted a different response if they’d just gone live with the stunt overnight.
Immediate consistency can also contribute to a successful rebranding initiative. The recent move by Dunkin’ Donuts to rebrand itself as “Dunkin’” would have felt odd if some stores had changed their logo and some hadn’t.
Whether you’re making an immediate change or gradual overhaul to your branding, send mixed signals to your target audience. The customer experience will change as you go through a rebranding, but these changes should always serve to keep your customers moving forward in their journey with your company.