Rebranding is the process of changing or updating the corporate image of a firm. Simply put, it involves creating a new look and feel for an existing product or a company by changing its logo, vision, mission, slogan, target audience, values, name of the firm, etc. Rebranding can occur for various reasons such as mergers and acquisitions, to differentiate a brand’s identity from its competitors, to attract new audiences or to improve brand awareness, etc.
While rebranding involves a tremendous amount of work; its success can help a brand achieve new heights.
Let’s check out the steps involved to implement an effective rebranding strategy:
- Establish Your Reasons for Rebranding: While rebranding can uplift your brand image, doing it for the wrong reasons might backfire on you. Think about rebranding only when there are changes in your vision and mission statements, target audiences, or landscape. Dunkin’ underwent the rebranding process to showcase that – they serve great coffee fast; this was done to accommodate its product and to expand the targeted market.
- Establish Rebranding Goals: Brands need to establish the overall objective they wish to achieve through rebranding. Whatever the reason, be it; to improve sales leads, to compete in the marketplace, or to attract a new audience. Setting rebranding goals also helps in measuring its success. According to an article in banking journal, brands can measure the following with their corresponding metrics:
Experience: A net promoter score can help determine a customer’s experience with the new brand image.
Exposure: Familiarity, preference, and consideration can help determine the exposure gained after rebranding.
Perception: Determine how consumers perceive products based on performance scores on satisfaction attributes.
Activation: Determine the response on products through sales conversions.
Behavior: Employee engagement scores, brand understanding scores, and cultural alignment can be used to determine how the employees perceive the brand.
- Identify Audience: Brands need to identify their new target audience as it helps them understand their customer’s goals, interests, demographics, challenges, and behaviors, etc. It also helps brands in determining how their current audience persona differs from the one they’re targeting.
- Vision and Mission: While re-evaluating your brand’s vision and mission statements, it is important to align them with overall strategic plans.
- Slogan and Brand Name: Sometimes, only a new name and slogan can help a brand’s revised vision and mission statements to reflect on its rebranding strategy. For example, Weight Watchers rebranded itself as a wellness company by tweaking its name and logo to match the target audience persona.
- Brand Identity: While creating a new identity, brands need to determine how they want people to perceive it and what they want to associate it with. For example, is it a company that thinks outside the box to provide solutions? or is it a luxurious brand? Once this is decided, all the creative elements like logo, website, etc., should align with the new brand identity. Microsoft Office created a new brand identity by making its program icons look more modern.
- Launch and Execute: For any marketer, going live is the most nerve-wracking event. For a successful launch, plan your marketing activities well and ensure to assign people with tasks and deadlines, so that there’s no room for micromanagement.
Whether it’s just an upgrade or a total makeover, proper implementation and execution of rebranding strategy can help achieve success.
