Choose your “Rebranding” wisely!
User perceptions when you decide to make changes in your brand.
WHAT IS A BRAND? IDENTITIES DEFINING YOUR BRAND.
A brand can be simply defined as an identity or recognition of the brand. The identity can be a logo or a textual name of the company. Color theory also plays an important role here. The brand can also be recognised by the colors they use, and the type of symbols or other identification marks can be labeled in branding.
CHOOSING A NAME FOR YOUR BRAND
Creating a brand name requires careful attention to detail and a lot of planning. Whether you’re a new company choosing your first name or renaming a brand, we have to be careful that it gives off the right vibes.
If you pick the wrong word or even the wrong letter for your name, you could do permanent damage to your reputation. If you want to know how to come up with rebranding that people will remember, keep on reading…
THOUGHTS ON REBRANDING AND ITS EFFECTS
Rebranding is expensive, exhausting, time consuming and very risky. Rebranding is done either when there is a necessity for it or the company is just being reckless or feeling dated as per the trend for new target audience.
Rebranding makes the complete customer experience a rollercoaster of emotions.
It is not just the colour and logo but also sales, emails, investors, marketing tools, messaging and on and on….
REASONS FOR REBRANDING
There are majorly two reasons why the brand is rebranded:
- The current brand does not portrays you in the desired manner
- The current brand is not clear or miscommunicates with its users
Although the results are not 100% sure either it can be too much for the users or it might just not be enough for the brand to work.
Here are some examples stating the rebranding of the brands which made a major impact on its users and the market:
FROM FACEBOOK TO METAVERSE
In the middle of all the chaos of leak of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the most popular social media tool would be changing its corporate name to…”Meta”
The decision was taken by Zuckerberg as he thought that Facebook was losing its charm among the teenage users. However, the term “Meta” is still unknown to a lot of users.
A company takes the decision of changing something in the company’s working to divert the users and draw their attention towards the brand. In Facebook’s case the change of name allowed the company to try and reposition itself and drown out the growing disagreement of the users as well as the employees.
Some of the user comments are as follows:
MYNTRA — LOGO UPDATE
Another such story is of Myntra, where a woman claimed that Myntra’s logo is offensive towards women and it depicted women to be scantily clad. Myntra’s response to this was very swift and they promised to change the logo across all their platforms within a period of 1 month.
The company had to face its impact economically as well as mentally. Changing one’s marketing strategy because of one reason is very exhausting for the brand.
It also shows that the company values their customers and their opinions. Myntra’s rapid response is one such lesson to the marketing industry. Branding axis are always cheap but the meaningful ones are worth the effort.
VODAFONE IDEA MERGER
One such recent example is Vodafone & Idea merger which resulted in Vi (read as ‘We’). This merger took place to compete with the other brands in the market like Airtel and the latest boom Reliance Jio.
When Vodafone decided to rebrand they raised a big amount of funding from the market. As per Vodafone Idea, their new brand name using only the initials of the two companies’ which makes the new logo short & simple and represents the spirit of unity and development by the merger. Also, with their new tagline — Together for Tomorrow, the organization is trying to build a strong bond amongst the user and hitting the audience to associate with Vi. They faced a lot of challenges to get accepted in the market. The rivals used twitter as a platform to backfire on the merger. But they are still surviving and will continue to survive by other means.
ZARA — Rebranding
The brand, being relevant for 45 years, has changed its logo for the second time in its tenure. The letters are now overlapping and the letters Z and R have a curve added to its typography. The change is not much but it is quite too much for the audience’s attention and to be the talk of the town.
Some user comments:
SLACK — Rebranding
Slack is a very common tool used for communicating between coworkers and clients. When the logo got revamped it created a lot of buzz. The new logo is refined and but still has got a bit of tinge with the old logo. The logo received a lot of positive feedback and is considered as an evolution in the branding world.
IKEA — Rebranding
IKEA changed its logo for the first time after 1983. Although the update is very subtle and hardly noticeable, the change is for the good. The logo is now compact and the colour coding suits on multiple platforms.
Few more examples of Rebranding:
IS IT WORTH THE EFFORT?
Whether it is a new name, identity, or logo, how people perceive rebranding is highly unpredictable, but there are a few things we can learn from these case studies.
Rebranding can be a nightmare or it can turn into an opportunity. That totally depends on the working environment and the end user but it is very important to have a due diligence done before taking the step. A company needs a lot of dedication to weather this task. Every brand is in a constant state of evolution and the changes in the brand should never stop.
