Rebranding Strategy: Your new brand should represent who you ARE, not who you WERE.
Posted by The Deksia Team & filed under Branding.
Illustrated & Edited by Teagan Burns
Many, if not most of the clients that come to Deksia are not sure exactly what a rebranding strategy looks like. They’re not sure why they should do it, what it looks like, and how it should be measured. Referencing two of our client brands, Procare and Chop, we’d like to give you a glimpse into the world of rebranding a company.
Why should I rebrand?
Procare, a landscaping company and one of our client brands, has been established for decades in their geographic area. With brands that already have an established identity, there’s a balancing act of making sure they’re still recognizable to potential clients who will work with them based on their built up brand equity, but also making sure their new image fits their company growth. Companies that start as a few people and a loan can grow into multimillion-dollar business- and with that kind of financial growth, the company should grow in their image and message, too. Your new brand should represent who you are, not who you were.
What should a good rebranding process look like?
We believe that a good rebrand should be based on four key elements of rebranding: shareholder research; current client research; potential client research; and the competitive audit. With shareholder and current client research, we find out what your employees and clientele currently like about your brand, and what they want to see out of your brand. With potential client research, we see what the clients you’d like to see want out of a brand like yours. Lastly, with the competitive audit, we compare your brand to other brands in your industry to see where you currently measure up, and where we have room to grow your identity.
Using all of these tools, we identify the Big Idea for your new brand: the message you will base all further brand decisions on. For Procare, the big idea was “Communication.” It was essential that, in the creation of every part of their brand, they asked “does this represent communication? Am I speaking for my brand’s message as a whole?” A Big Idea is essential to further brand building, because it acts as the foundation that all other brand pieces must rest on, for the sake of continuity and clarity.
How should I measure the success of a rebrand?
This one is tricky, because initial measurements are almost never great. For instance, with Chop- Procare’s tree care sub-brand- the initial individual responses were almost all negative. Comments would arise stating that people believed the brand was a butcher shop, obviously a far cry from what they were looking for. Yet, despite individual responses, the brand has since increased their profit by 400%. This is a common occurrence, and this example is representative of how rebrands should really be measured: not by the occasional comment of a naysayer, but by the hard numbers that come in. Individual feedback is subjective, while numbers tell all because they’re based on data, not gut feeling.
These numbers will take a while, though. Ideally, rebrands should be measured on a 2 to 3 year term, rather than a 60 to 90 day term. Even good change gives a company growing pains, so seeing immediate results is often not feasible. What’s important is that the representatives of that brand ask, “does our rebrand encourage people to sell our product or service? Does it motivate employees to do their job and feel good about it? Do employees feel like the brand matches the values they expect?” If companies truly want feedback from individuals, the people who work within are going to be the ones to ask, as they have seen the before and after from the inside out.
If you’re interested in learning about the state of your business’s rebranding strategy, give us a call at Deksia. We can schedule you for a 15 minute consultation to talk about your business and what the next step is. You can go to our website or contact us at our Grand Rapids, MI office at (616) 570–8111.
