It’s never a good time,
but there are plenty of perfect opportunities.
In a way, rebranding is like getting a divorce.
At some point you realize things are no longer working out with the sweetheart of your youth. Maybe it’s something you did. Maybe it’s no one’s fault. Maybe a single event has prompted a re-examination of who and what you are. Or perhaps you’ve just grown apart, and what felt great years ago just doesn’t feel right today.
The only thing left to ask yourself is when to make that change. It will be tumultuous, it will be emotional, and it may alternately feel like both the right thing and the wrong thing to do. But ultimately, it may be your only way forward.
Simply put, re-branding is a matter of re-engineering the building blocks of your offering – real and perceived – in a way that will add value to your brand from the perspective of your customers. The scope of the project can be as revolutionary as completely re-engineering your company in the way it does business and presents itself to the marketplace, or simply retelling your story in a way that better reflects the times and your offering as it has evolved.
No easy decision.
The barrier for many organizations is a tendency to see a rebranding project only in its biggest, most complex and disruptive form. At its essence, a rebranding is a strategic effort, a desire to align the brand more completely with the actual needs of the business. Any good branding exercise is as much about defining who you are NOT going to be, so you can more clearly define for your audience who you ARE going to be. The scope of a rebranding depends on how much realignment is necessary, and how much is already in place.
And many organizations look at the prospect of rebranding purely in terms of cost, not cost-versus-benefit. Hard costs paid to a branding agency appear on your P&L, while the cost of a weak brand does not. But the effect on your business cannot be ignored.
Crucial to selling through the expense of this effort, therefore, is clearly identifying the scenarios and situations that should trigger a rebranding exercise, as well as the factors that will help determine the scope of the effort itself. These triggers include changes to the organization, to its culture, significant growth plans for the organization, and changes to the environment in which your brand must continue to compete.
Organizational Triggers.
Any truly revolutionary restructuring of an organization’s offering should be reflected in a re-examination of the brand, to communicate the significance of the change to both internal and external audiences. An organizational change can take many forms – a change in offering that leads to selling in a different category, a change in the way a company delivers its services, even new leadership’s vision pushing an organization to reach new sectors and new audiences. The return of Steve Jobs to Apple moved the company from being a computer maker to one that more seamlessly delivered entertainment, mobile, desktop, and all forms of internet connectedness. The introduction of the iMac/iTunes/iPhone/iPad structure of their family of products reflected this new reality in how the brand presented its offering. Significant organizational change needs to have a significant effect on the brand. Ask us more about Organizational triggers.
Cultural Triggers.
Often an uncomfortable inconsistency in corporate culture can reveal the need to rebrand.
If employees across the organization tell different versions of the brand story – or can’t tell the story at all – it’s a good indication it needs to be re-written.
In our work for wealth management firm Richardson GMP, there was a clear cultural divide between Winnipeg-based Richardson Partners Financial (patrician) and GMP Private Wealth (Bay Street dealmakers).
The solution came from uncovering the common goals of advisors in both firms – the concept of independence – which was crucial to recruiting successful advisors (and their portfolios!) away from competing firms. Advertising, recruitment materials, even the user experience of the corporate website reflected the desire for individual advisors to manage their business and advise their clients the way they think best, providing clear cultural differentiation from the big banks and institutional wealth management firms. Ask us more about Cultural triggers.
Growth Triggers.
Growth can often be the clearest signal that a rebranding is necessary. Mergers and acquisitions are motivating times for everyone to participate in an assessment of where the new organization will focus, and a rebranding can help people from multiple backgrounds take ownership of the new direction.
Scotiabank’s purchase of ING Direct is a perfect example of a mandated rebranding (ING wanted their name back) that also became an opportunity to assess what was strongest about the brand, and find a way of growing and evolving while keeping what was working. Tangerine keeps the bold orange colour, whimsical, anti-big-bank personality and focus on saving, without a dependence on the owner bank brand.
When our client Porsche introduced the Cayenne – moving solely from high performance sports cars to offer an SUV (and later a sedan in the Panamera) – the brand needed to refocus on its message and its audience. While less a rebranding than a strategic diversification, the challenge was to find what was common from the racing and pure sports car worlds and the new products they’d introduced – in this case a dedication to performance, engineering, style and exclusivity. Ask us more about Growth triggers.
Environmental Triggers.
Market forces may be among the most important and yet least appreciated triggers for rebranding. Sometimes the world changes, and by doing nothing you find your brand positioned by default, far from where it used to be.
Sometimes markets and audiences change, creating a new white space and new opportunities for brands to position themselves. Grey Power has built a brand aimed at aging boomers with clean driving records and a continuing need to drive, where a much smaller market existed before. In Trinidad and the Caribbean, we worked with Scotiabank to launch the youth sub-brand Scotiabank Be, appealing to a growing population of young banking customers previously considered too unprofitable to accommodate. As these markets evolve, brands have the opportunity to position themselves where they’re needed.
Often competitors redefine the nature of a category, and without taking active control of your own positioning, you risk being positioned – unfavorably – by them. Low-end products can suffer when a brand moves the market up-scale. McDonalds’ breakfast business was threatened by competitors like Starbucks and Second Cup who served higher quality coffee to an increasingly gourmet coffee-centric market. Equally, high-end brands can suffer when competitors commoditize premium offerings – much as Winners and Zara have taken the pretentiousness and high prices out of contemporary fashion. The only way to protect the margins of a premium brand is to invest in the perceived values that brand bestows on its followers. Like Apple, lululemon, Pandora, Michael Kors.
And sometimes even technology forces brands to change. Google, like many big companies, has evolved its identity plenty of times – becoming more sophisticated and more aligned with a defined positioning as the brand matures from a quirky start-up to a corporate behemoth. But their most recent rebranding was aimed at adapting to a market where screens are smaller and more diverse, choosing a simpler, sans serif typeface, and simplifying their icons and colours to work better on handheld devices. Ask us more about Environmental triggers.
This is the end. And the beginning.
Like a conscious uncoupling, your decision to rebrand is going to be a disruption. You are going to spoil someone’s Christmas, Easter, or summer vacation. But at some point, NOT doing it will start causing more damage to your brand than finally taking the action you know is necessary.
