Rebranding: excitement or myopia
In an ever faster ever more competitive landscape, organisations of all shapes and sizes will at some point decide on the brave step of embarking on a rebranding journey. I say brave as such a move executed well, will engender a strategic shift in positioning and cultural change in the brand’s centre of gravity. Such a bold step will undoubtedly involve blood, sweat and tears along the way to bring about the desired success.
There are though a number of smart things that you can do to smooth out any bumps in the road along the way to helping you reap the rewards of your endeavours.
During a few decades of brand consulting, I’ve learnt a thing or two about successfully planning a rebrand once the senior leadership has given its blessing to initiating the program. I’m going to share just some of the fundamental considerations.
There’s a lot more than meets the eye
The challenge organisations are faced with is that rebranding programs are relatively inexpensive to set in motion yet considerably more expensive to execute. In the white heat of excitement at the front end, its easy to get caught up in creating the sharpest of positioning ideas and coolest of concept designs but all the while, has the organisation fully mapped out – and costed - a whole roadmap from start to finish, factoring the launch and roll out; which are vital for successful execution.
For any rebranding project to have its fullest impact the strategy, design and roll out need to be one joined up approach, from the outset.
This lack of foresight can cause problems down the line, which we’ll pick up on shortly. So here are some of those fundamentals.
The foresight of a joined up approach
You can only really determine if you can fully afford to deliver an impactful rebrand if you’ve costed out some scenarios for the whole program – from the brand design and guidelines through to potential go to market brand activation. Often times I’ve seen a siloed approach to planning, timeframes and costings and this lack of synthesis can stymie the momentum when it comes to critical decision-making throughout the journey. Getting overly caught up in the short-term milestones of the brand design can come at the expense of not focusing enough attention downstream on the roll-out plan, which should be running in parallel.
While the final complexion of the roll out plan and its application to brand assets may not be fully determined until the brand concept is signed off, there is lots of proactive up front work that can done. Conducting audits of brand assets and prioritising those that will give you the greatest impact will pay you handsomely. If you can pinpoint the 20% of brand assets that will generate 80% of your launch impact you’ll be in a good space.
No nasty shocks please
What you don’t want is to suddenly realise (down the line) the level of investment required to impactfully launch the brand and give the CFO, CEO and their C-Suite colleagues a nasty shock. This consultation and collaborative working should be done from the very outset, so everyone in the leadership team is aware and aligned to a fully integrated end-to-end rebrand programme with cost scenarios, timings and an order of priorities – joining all the dots. For brands in the Fortune 100 rolling out rebrands can come in at 20 times the cost of designing the brand. For SME’s this is less but still a holistically conceived roadmap will nevertheless be a vital tool.
The marketing team are not sole guardians of the rebrand
As brands have become the lens through which successful organisations channel all their efforts, everyone has a stake in the brand. Not just the marketing team. For sure the Chief Marketing Officer and their team will drive the program but they will need the unconditional support of the senior leadership team as well as cross-functional teams in finance, hr, operations and sales among others. The CMO should advocate and gain full support of their leadership and cross-functional colleagues by delivering a detailed roadmap that describes the investment, the launch dates and timescales and the organisational change required.
More than just visual dynamics
While the visual identity and brand logo will be applied to a plethora of agreed brand identity carriers from social media and online platforms through to signage, not everything is visual alone. A pivotal part of going to market will be orchestrating a change in organisational culture, aligning everyone internally behind the brand’s vision and values so people are continuously inspired by the new purpose of the brand to deliver its promise. The language of the new brand will be as much verbal as it is visual and so tone of voice will be integral to brand messaging to amplify the visual identity.
Don’t internalise the roll-out
Many organisations internalise the roll-out on the mistaken assumption they can handle everything in house when it comes to execution. It’s critical that the external perspective sought at the front end of the brand design journey is sustained throughout the wider journey at least beyond internal brand engagement and into the early roll-out phase of visual brand assets. This level of advisory brand guardianship will help you enormously to keep everything on track (and on budget) and optimise the rebrand benefits. Across their whole career CMO’s won’t be involved in too many rebrand programs. Branding agencies and specialist implementation project managers do this for a living. In such crucial strategic moments, CMO’s can’t afford to get it wrong. So keep good counsel.
These are just some of the considerations when planning a rebrand, there are many more. In essence if you plan out everything (literally everything) holistically from the word go – from the initial brand workshops to the installation of the last sign – you are setting yourself up for a great chance of a highly impactful rebrand as the catalyst for success and growth.
Tony Lorenz
Tony is the Strategy and Planning Director of Walker Lorenz and an international brand consultant working with organisations on transformative brand change programs.