The Art of Rebranding: Is It Right for Your Business?
It seems like everyone’s rebranding these days, from major brands looking to introduce new logo designs to a simple refresh, like the recent BMW logo. We’re also seeing many major brands leveraging their icon in a more promotional way, such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and others jumping on the “social distancing” bandwagon to help convey important health messaging during the COVID-19 crisis — with mixed results. While the latter is less of a long-term rebranding move, here are some thoughts to consider before adjusting any of your brand’s most precious codified assets.
What prompts a rebrand?
There isn’t a fixed timetable for when to rebrand — some experts calculate every 7-10 years, on average — but it may be sooner or could go much longer depending on a brand’s specific circumstances. A variety of strategic, business, and market-related reasons can prompt a rebrand, such as one or more of the following:
The original line of goods or services no longer apply.
The brand has acquired or merged with another brand.
Shifting audiences or negative market perceptions has slowed growth.
Assets appear dated or no longer reflect current brand values.
More than an identity or logo change.
To properly kick off your business’s rebranding effort, it’s important for all involved to understand the primary purpose of a rebrand. With data in hand, one must fully evaluate whether this strategy will bear the return on investment desired and that the effort will be worthwhile. Rebrands can open new doors, expand your customer base, provide incremental lift to existing product lines, and more, but ultimately it needs to make sense for your brand.
From there, consider providing clear strategic direction for your design team that encompasses all aspects of the current branding system, including color, icons, word marks, fonts, taglines, and any other iconography currently in use. After you internally commit to your brand’s new direction and have it pass legal muster, I also recommend testing the new identity against existing logos to gauge customer response and allow time for a potential tweak before production begins. (This may be more complex if other languages and global markets are involved.)
Lastly, apply the new identity to a range of products and packaging as well as digital and physical media so that legibility and guidelines for usage can be tested and alternate versions developed, if necessary.
Audit all the places your identity appears and develop a rollout strategy.
But that’s just the beginning. In rebranding, there’s more to consider than just the redesign of the brand’s graphic assets — one of the first things the refreshed or changed identity will affect is your product, packaging, and/or service. Audit your existing supply chain to reduce as much excess “old” product as possible before ordering and ultimately shipping the rebranded products into retail channels to help avoid shopper confusion and price discounting. Determining when products will go live is a good place to start, and then work backward to determine ideal launch dates. You’ll need to factor specific channels, domestic as well as global, into the launch plan as well. For sophisticated global brands, a tiered approach or a rolling change may help reduce the pressure to launch all brands, all channels, all markets at once.
Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
Depending on the depth and breadth of your brand’s reach and product line, a successful rollout may take upward of 12-24 months. And never before has the saying “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” been truer. Guiding a company through a transformative rebranding involves Herculean execution, with many touch points and logistics along the way. Planning ahead, managing milestones, and offering consistent communication with team members, however, can help even the most complex endeavor exceed expectations.