Rebranding is a bold and exciting new step in an organization’s life. If done properly, it can be a giant leap towards boldly defining your position, visual presence, and your overall way of behaving as an organization. Your brand is arguably one of the most important business assets you’ll ever maintain. Although it may viewed as an intangible and immeasurable asset, it has incredible potential to make any organization an amazing success story.

If you are at a stage where a rebrand is being considered, it’s extremely important to get it right. There are many famous cases of rebranding failures. In most of those cases, the stories come from major retail brands that are far beyond the scope and spectrum of that everyday mid-sized organization looking to change (or enhance) its position or visual direction. Often times, the failures they write about with these rebrands involve a distaste for a revamped logo or packaging design. We hear little about all of the other components that go into that rebrand (not to mention the brand continue to be even with the new look). Most organizations are not mega brands and do not fall in the category of having that much exposure. For those regular everyday businesses and organizations, a rebrand should encompass a lot more than simply a visual identity upgrade. The very fabric for how the organization appears, acts and positions itself should all be ingrained into the rebranding process.

With this in mind, here is a step-by-step guide as to what should be included in a well planned company rebrand.

Step 1 – Identify the business you are in

I lead into the process with a very important (and often times tough) question. What are you in the business of doing? For a company that offers X, but also offers Y, Z, A, B and C suggests that the organization does a lot of things, but nothing overly well. This applies to both service and product-based businesses. Becoming the jack of all trades and master of none is not a position that’s going to leverage an organization as offering something uniquely special over that of its competition. Nor does it make it easy to tell the world what the business uniquely does. Know your niche and be prepared to back it up as to why you are amazing at what you do.

For a lot of organizations, that may not always be abundantly clear. This may require some soul and examination of what your customers, audience, business model and strengths/opportunities are telling you.

Step 2 – Inventory brand touchpoints

Brands should always be presented consistently and effectively so as to not create confusion to the consumer. Great brand recognition comes from consistency.

Therefore, as a key step in building a rebranding plan, an inventory should be taken to identify all brand touchpoints. Consider what’s been done in the past, present and future. For many, creating an inventory of all brand touchpoints is not an easy undertaking. You may not always be able to identify them all, but do your best. To be effective, all materials must systematically be updated to reflect the new brand look, messaging, naming or positioning. And at times, this step alone can stifle or deter brands from going through the process of building a new brand.

Interestingly enough, SurveyMonkey has defined brand touchpoints well, as noted in this article. A touchpoint is any time a potential customer or customer comes in contact with your brand–before, during, or after they purchase something from you.

This is not just limited to customers. Anyone coming into contact with your brand should have a consistent experience.

When rebranding, inventory all brand touchpoints such as:

• Logo assets (master brand logo, sub-brand logos, product brands, etc.)
• Philosophy statements such as mission, vision, values, mottos, taglines, value propositions or positioning statements
• Visual identity and brand standards
• Brand tone of voice
• Stationery & business forms
• Websites, mobile apps and affiliate websites
• Social media
• Advertising
• Tradeshow collateral and vehicle graphics
• Signage and billboards
• Online profiles (Google My Business, Yelp, Hotfrog, etc.)
• Photography and video assets
• Packaging and product branding
• Email signatures
• Phone greetings and telemarketing scripts
• Email marketing
• Event branding & philanthropic efforts
• Blogs and other content initiatives
• PR
• Podcasts
• Word of mouth

In the digital world, a tool such as Open Site Explorer can identify your website’s backlinks. When completing a brand touchpoint assessment, identify all team members who can contribute. Create a master inventory list to document brand imprinting. Brand leadership expert, author and speaker Denise Lee Yohn has provided a great brand touchpoint wheel template here.

Step 3 – Know your audience

As with any marketing, branding efforts demand a certain level of knowledge about your current and/or ideal customer. When rebranding takes place, attributes of your ideal audience are infused into every aspects of the creative or brand strategy process. Without a proper understanding of an organization’s ideal audience, the process of establishing brand positioning, brand voice, photography standards, visual identity or cultural standards are all inhibited greatly. Brand positioning or a value proposition taps into the motivations and behaviours of an organization’s desired audience.

Identifying your audience can take time as well. To be effective, consider developing buyer personas for your most ideal audience, which challenges the organization to come up with a profile of your most ideal customer, client or in some cases, referrer. HubSpot has curated a great article that provides an in-depth explanation on how to build out a buyer persona. And here’s another insightful article written by Moosend that will aid and explain.

 

Step 4 – Identify your greatest strengths

For a rebrand to be effective, an organization must uncover and capitalize on its greatest strengths. Whether it be service, product quality or an overall customer experience replicated by no one else, knowing your organization’s greatest strengths will empower you to establish the foundation of a unique brand position.

In an old school fashion, I have always approached this process by completing a SWOT analysis. With a team in-hand, establish a way to conduct a team brainstorming session to uncover your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Each team member should reflect carefully on each of these categories in preparation for a meeting with the working group. Get all of the ideas out and narrow down to a final SWOT analysis. Following this, uncover strengths that are unique and leverageable.

Avoid cliché statements wherever possible. Statements such as “we offer great service” or “we’re have a lot of experience” offer little in terms of a unique position. Everyone does that. Compare that to your competitors, how is that any more special than what they will use. Find that unique strength that not only makes you impermeable to your competition, but establishes a new way of doing business in your industry. See the potential in your organization’s personality at the same time.

Step 5 – Build a brand position

Establishing a strong brand position can be an incredibly challenging task. Most organizations are simply too close to their day-to-day work and as a result, we often don’t have a complete picture as to what our clients, staff and other stakeholders truly believe is unique about us. Highly effective brand positioning statements outline the very fabric of the business you are in, who you help, who you won’t help, and why your unique qualified to help. Businesses with the best brand positioning create an eco-system to what they do where no one else does what they do. They’ve unique identified a way they solve problems like no other. There’s no replacement for the work that well positioned organizations do.

Developing a strong brand position takes time, research, consumer insight and a whole lot of soul-searching to uncover an organization’s best self. Drafting a brand positioning framework challenges organizations to truly understand the niche business they are in and who they ideally prefer to focus on. But it must be supported by a very strong product or service and a process or experience that truly aligns with the brand position. Most importantly, once a brand position is established, the organization must learn to embrace and practice it so that it guides the actions and decisions of every day-to-day decision in the organization. It formulates the voice of the organization and ultimately, helps to ensure decision-making is more clear. You know what business you are in…and what business you are not. When brand positioning is done well, you have so much clarity as to where your organization is going and what it stands for. It’s truly powerful.

Step 6 – Build a smart visual brand identity

Now that you’ve uncovered a lot about the organization and it’s best self, now is the time to bring the brand identity to life. From the organizational logo, website design, stationery, business forms, email signature, brochures, guides/booklets, signage, digital and print advertising and more, any aspect of a brand’s visual identity needs to be consistent and reflective of the new brand look and feel. See “Step 2” above for a reference to brand attributes. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand the full extend of where your brand is imprinted and therefore, it can be very beneficial to get a brand agency to assist you in conducting a brand audit of your organization. During this process, they can not only uncover how your brand is being used visually, but through other means. They can also help to shape out and uncover every aspect of each of the brand steps above.

To build a smart visual brand identity, ensure the designer or design firm fully understands all there is to know about your organization and test them to see if they truly know how to channel this organizational insight into the look and feel of the new logo and brand identity system. In our work, we believe holistically in conducting a brand attributes exercise with all of our branding or rebranding clients. This helps to formalize and narrow down the brand personality into just a few keywords that help to guide the design team as to how to bring it to life visually. For example, a logo reflecting “fun” will look much different than a logo reflecting “sophisticated”. Everything from brand colours, typography, illustrative elements, logo composition, user experience and copy/tone will be affected by brand attribute terms.

In going through the brand identity phase, ensure the designer or firm has a decent brand rollout package. At minimum, it should consists of the logo in all varying formats, visual identity or brand standards that provides brand colour values, primary/secondary typefaces, examples of incorrect logo usage, minimum clear-space requirements, presentation of brand positioning, brand values and template examples (application) of brand collateral.

One thing that can often get overlooked in the brand building process is the brand tone of voice. Whether this be a formal exercise, or simply the intent to hire a good copywriter who can bring it to life, copy plays alongside the visual identity and brand purpose to engage with your audience. Further to this, other brand assets such as video, podcasts and all play a role into the content and personality of your visual brand identity.

Step 7 – Make it a big part of your organizational culture

Before any organization launches a new brand, its particularly important to obtain buy-in and develop a promotion/rollout plan to make the new brand a big part of the organization’s being. The face of the brand is those who work for your organization. If they continue to do their work with in the same traditional manner that is not reflective of the new brand creed, then the rebranding effort will fail.

At minimum, an organization should establish a way to bring in varying team members from various departments into the rebranding process. These same people should also act as your brand champions who will help to empower the rest of the organization in aligning their activities and actions towards the new brand direction. They can also help to police the actions of the brand to ensure its being used consistently by everyone.

To rollout a brand, consider the development of a team-building activity, event or campaign to create energy, excitement and the introduction of a bold new direction. Underneath that, work with those responsible for HR in your organization to mentor them as well as to help identify staff members who may struggle to properly reflect the brand. Those team members may need extra coaching and support. In some circumstances, those team members may no longer be a good fit to the organization’s new mandate.

There are brand HR consultants who specialize in brand culture. If the budget supports it, we believe they can provide tremendous value to the rebranding process.

Step 8 – Customer journey mapping & sales funnel development

Before any organization launches a new brand, its particularly important to obtain buy-in and develop a promotion/rollout plan to make the new brand a big part of the organization’s being. The face of the brand is those who work for your organization. If they continue to do their work with in the same traditional manner that is not reflective of the new brand creed, then the rebranding effort will fail.

Step 9 – Launching your new brand

Now that you’ve gone through the exhaustive (and exciting) process of building a new brand identity, purpose, position and focus, the final stage is to develop a launch plan.

But first, some of the most difficult questions to address include:

1. When is the best time to launch the new brand?
2. Should everything be complete before launching?
3. How do we handle previous brand materials that are already out there?
4. How do we properly announce to the world that a new brand is in place?

These are all very relevant questions. In our opinion, it is best to launch a new brand when as much as possibly can be in place is in place. The change-out should be swift and calculated. New signs should be installed at the same time a new website is launched. Business forms, social media presence, Google My Business profiles, sales collateral and should all begin at the same time. And so on and so on. Develop a calculated strategy to launch the brand quickly and effectively will allow for the greatest impact. Otherwise, you are diluting the effectiveness of that new brand’s presence.

One thing to recognize is that not all materials can readily be updated. Be aware that previous print collateral such as brochures, guides, previous print ads and more may already be in circulation and you won’t be able to make an impact. Furthermore, when a new website goes live, there may be a period where search engines such as Google must re-crawl the site again to update SERP results. Regardless, do your best to swiftly deliver the new brand with impact, consistency and vigour.

Have a well thought-out launch plan and consider ways to garner PR during the rollout process.

Final thoughts

Think carefully about how you rebrand. Ensure its the right time and you have a team available to help. When you hire a brand agency, that does not alleviate effort on your side. Many organizations will only do some of the steps above and that’s OK, however, those who want their brand to be the most successful will follow a thorough process of discovery, position, purpose, culture, visual consistency and in the right content tone. Above all else, think carefully about your product, service or cause before getting into this. Are you truly onto something great? A beautiful brand cannot mask an ineffective product or service.