Tips for Rebranding a Business
A few weeks ago, in a post titled “Pick a Brand, Any Brand,� I mentioned that Doba had just emerged from an exhaustive brand migration project. For the first three years in the life of the company, we called ourselves Wholesale Marketer. Then, last year, because we wanted to be able to define for ourselves what our company does and what we stand for, we decided to rebrand.
To most everyone on the planet, “Wholesale Marketer� means something, and at the end of the day, we felt pigeonholed by the name. After a lot of thought, internal team discussions and more than a few disagreements, we chose “Doba�, which aside from being a small town in the southern part of Chad and an obscure character in a Star Wars role-playing game, means absolutely nothing to 99.999 percent of the Homo sapiens roaming the planet today.
While picking a new name may seem like child’s play, I can tell you firsthand that a rebranding campaign is anything but a simple matter. From updating corporate papers and vendor agreements to educating your customers and employees about why rebranding is necessary, before it’s all said and done, you’ll literally find yourself tearing into every single facet of your business to complete the migration.
If your company is thinking about rebranding, keep these tips in mind:
- Rebranding means more than just creating new graphics. Rebranding usually involves significant changes to your company name, mission and vision statements, brand logo, image, marketing strategy, advertising themes, sales presentations, collateral materials, company documents, staff recruitment and retention strategies, and employee training programs, just to name a few. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that rebranding just means creating a new logo.
- If you’re going to rebrand, consider being original. Go the extra mile to see if there’s value in being unique. Sure, you could call your funkadelic lampshade company, “The Lampshade Company,� but you could also call it “Funkadelic,� which is scalable and may resonate better with both your target customer and staff.
- Identify a clear leader for managing the brand migration process. Once you have your new brand in hand, you’ll need to assign someone to coordinate the project and make appropriate “go� & “no-go� decisions. The key here… avoid groupthink. Be clear about what you intend to accomplish, and give the leader the authority to manage the task at hand.
- Form a task force. Rebranding affects all of your employees, every department at your company, 100 percent of the customers you’ve ever had, and all of your business partners and vendors. Right from the get-go, establish a task force whose membership is representative of each and every stakeholder you serve. Charge the task force with looking out for the unique needs of each demographic, and make it their job to drill down and narrowcast their efforts, leaving no stone unturned in the effort to migrate to the new brand and communicate the impending change.
- Charge the brand migration task force with generating and monitoring a giant list of all the small and large changes that will be required for full brand migration. Beware: This list will be big and feel totally overwhelming, but once you have it down in an Excel spreadsheet (or in another task tracking tool), it will be relatively easy to monitor the brand migration’s progress. Items to include on the list are: changes to merchant credit card processing accounts, logos, web site copy, job descriptions, press releases, better business bureau listings, telephone directory listings, outgoing telephone greetings, legal filings, employment contracts, business cards, brochures, etc. Remember, no item is too small for this list.
- Set a deadline for the migration and stick to it. No matter how big or small your company may be, rebranding is a big undertaking, and someone will always be able to generate valid reasons to shift the launch date. Trust me…you need to set a deadline and you need to stick to it. At Doba, even after we knew we were going to rebrand, we procrastinated for quite a while. Finally, we set a somewhat arbitrary deadline and just pushed to get it done. If it helps, think about the timing of your biggest trade show or sales presentation of the year. Prepare a soft launch three months in advance (that way you allow yourself enough time to work out the kinks before the big show or presentation).
- Communicate with key stakeholders before the launch. Internally, make sure every single employee—from members of the management team to the people you entrust to answer the phones—understands why rebranding was necessary and what it means to the company moving forward. Externally, inform your customers of the impending change, and seek your business partner’s and vendor’s cooperation early on in the process in adjusting external links back to your newly branded web site and name.
These days, companies like mine have to realize that for our brand and business strategies to be aligned, our brand cannot be driven solely by the activities of one department within the company verses another. Delivering bottom line results against the promises of our brand strategy requires that every level of our organization lives, breaths, and owns the Doba brand. Hopefully, the tips I’ve provided here can help you achieve similar results.
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