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9 Tips For Rebranding Your Company

So you’ve decided that you want to rebrand your company. Rebranding can prove to be a brilliant business move, it can help boost sales and increase your overall market share. On the flip side, if done wrong, it can send your business tanking into irrelevance. Here are 9 tips on how to ace your company rebrand.

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#1 Consider Brand Voice

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When looking to do a rebrand the first thing you should identify is your voice. Who are you and why do you care about whatever it is that you are selling? When you can honestly answer that question you must then think about who your audience is. Once you are clear on who you are and why you do what you do and who your audience is, you are ready for the fun stuff!

You can then think about how well your name fits your mission, followed by tagline clean-up/creation, logo re-design, and content overhaul. The point here is to clarify your message using content and art to help your customers understand why they should work with you. Everything you do should start with your mission and carry forward through customer service. A rebrand is a great opportunity to recalibrate your image and “change your wardrobe” if your gear is out of style or alignment with your mission.

Contributors: Haj Carr from Trueline

#2 Give Your Team a Sense of Brand Ownership

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In order for your rebranding to be successful, your entire staff needs to believe in your organization's new look and feel. If there's a disconnect, or if the new brand is a surprise or feels forced upon them, your staff will not buy in and will not effectively communicate your new brand to the market. The key is to designate a core team to spearhead the brand refresh process; they lead the charge and make decisions.

This core team should be charged with managing the internal communication process from launch to finish in a transparent and inclusive manner. We've all heard the phrase, Too many chefs in the kitchen. You have to be careful when it comes to inputs into the rebranding process. Too many voices will cause gridlock while completely isolating your team from the rebranding process can be damaging as well. You need to choose your team carefully in order to make sure the rebranding sticks and is effective.

Contributors: Mira Bragg from Illumine8 Marketing & PR

#3 Clear Understandable Brand Name

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I re-branded my company in 2015 from BMC Headwear to King & Fifth Supply Co. My biggest piece of advice would be to choose a brand name that is clear and people can understand during an introduction. Before we rebranded, I can remember countless times when people would ask... what, huh,.. what was the name? It sounds so elementary, but it was so true. How would anyone remember us if the name didn't even roll off our tongue clean and clear? Second I would say would be to develop a name that sounds expensive and of superior value. We made many changes once we rebranded, but I truly feel these two changes helped the brand get to the next step.

Contributors: Brian Mcalister from King & Fifth Supply Co 

#4 Visual Identity: Tell A Story

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We just rebranded LargeChickenCoops.com as Rita Marie's Chicken Coops. The biggest reason for the new brand name was to tell the story of who we are and why we are in this business. Our hope is that the new name, along with the new visual identity and marketing communications will resonate with our audience and grow our relationship deeper with our customers. One of the greatest exercises during this process was to make our mission more clear, and establish a set of values that we can plant our flag in. These pieces have become the DNA that everything else has grown from.

As far as the visual identity goes, one of the most helpful parts of that process was creating a mood board of brands, products, and aesthetics that resonate with our audience. We were able to use these to inform the graphic design process, all the way down to typography, color system, illustration and photography styles. Being a brand that lives mostly in the digital space made roll-out of the new brand fairly simple, we just needed to coordinate when everything launched. We didn't have any complicated printed collateral or expensive signage that brick and mortar brands might have to coordinate.

Contributors: Simon Trask from Large Chicken Coops

#5 Think About Associations

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Our brains work by association. For example, when you hear the term blue square your brain has to sort through all the colors and all the shapes to come back with an image of a blue square. Our brains are constantly making comparisons (whether we know it or not) so it is important to know all the things your name/logo/colors/tagline are closely associated and what someone might think when they see your new branding. If it is in line with your message, great! If not, it might be worth going down a different path. 

Contributors: Melina Palmer from The Brainy Business

#6 Always Promote Your Re-brand

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A logo change does not constitute a rebrand.

Rebranding means redefining the way you communicate your company's identity. And when you change the way you communicate your identity, you need to ensure that it aligns with your existing customers, prospects, and of course, all stakeholders. Because there are so many involved parties, it's crucial that your rebrand is communicated effectively (both internally and externally). Potential issues resulting from not communicating your rebrand:

  • Making customers feel out of the loop or confused
  • Making investors or employees feel like their opinion doesn't matter

Benefits of announcing your rebrand:

  • You can leverage the announcement to promote brand awareness
  • You can use the announcement as a way to engage existing customers

Make sure you communicate the why behind your new image. If you can't identify the why, you probably shouldn't be rebranding.

Contributors: Jeffrey Bumbales from Credibly 

#7 Opportunity to convey where a company is heading

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A rebrand should be seen as an opportunity to go back to the roots of a company’s reason for being. It is a unique chance to re-think an organization’s deeper meaning, then connect it to re-envisioned shared values and launch in an all-encompassing way, touching company culture as much as marketing and sales. A rebrand is a huge opportunity to convey where a company is heading to the internal and external audience. From a visual and verbal point of view, be clear on how far you want to pivot or evolve versus benefiting from your brand legacy. A rebrand is as exhilarating as it is daunting, and all for the same reasons.

Contributors: Fabian Geyrhalter from FINIEN 

#8 Know What You Need to Accomplish

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Before you approach an agency for your rebrand, you should understand what the rebrand needs to accomplish. Has your company grown out of touch with your current consumer because your logos, colors and brand voice are outdated? Then you’ll want this rebrand to make you more relevant in the modern consumer landscape. Have more competitors come into your space and you want to differentiate? Then differentiation is one key thing you’ll want to accomplish. Without this, an agency, who does not know your business best will be left to figure this out and will, most of the time, charge for the time spent doing this. 

Contributors: Keith Clingman from Studio7

#9 Consultations – Do the Research

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Consult the experts – but don't take their word as the be-all and end-all. Consultants, agencies, and others will be a great resource to learn as much as you can about rebranding processes, leverage them to learn as much as possible. But, don't forget, many of them are gunning for your business. Just because they say something will take 6 months, does not necessarily mean it will.

Also talk to your customers, your colleagues, and your partners. Your brand means a lot to you, but it means a lot to all those affiliated with it as well. Ask for their advice as you go through the rebranding process to make sure they feel connected and proud of what you're recreating.

Contributors: Dave Lastovskiy from Bus

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Written by Zak Parker

Journalist, writer, musician, professional procrastinator. I'll add more here later.

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