How To Launch A New Brand Identity
Cognitive scientists say that our attention is a scarce resource. Unfortunately, as a marketer, you have to fight to earn it. Very hard! Effective marketing communication requires that a message isn’t just sent — but is also heard and understood.
Most brands can’t even get passed the first bottleneck of communications as customers are getting better and better at ignoring marketing messages. That’s why, in today’s world, your brand’s greatest threat is not another company; it is the indifference of your customer!
Luckily, as a marketer, you have one silver bullet in your arsenal: launching a new brand identity. If done correctly, the identity launch could add conversational capital to your brand. Here are three tips for creating a brand people love to talk about:
1. Don’t sell the solution. Sell the problem.
From a brand strategy standpoint, there are two ways you can introduce a new identity: by selling the solution or by selling the problem. The former is the desired option. Unfortunately, most brand identity launches fall under the latter category.
When launching brand identity, usually, 90% of marketers’ energy and time is put into selling the solution. They conduct research, craft strategy, hire a design agency, and then introduce the world’s new identity. However, most of your brand community is not in the market for solutions to problems that they don’t even know.
As a marketer, your job is to make your customers understand there is a problem with the brand. Once the awareness of the issue is established, then engage people to be a part of the solution. If you do that, you don’t have to sell your solution. It is theirs already! That brings us to our second point.
2. Branding is a democratic process.
Brand management is an autocratic one.
Customer engagement doesn’t necessarily mean having a creative contest or getting customers blessing every step of the process. Instead, it means informing your caring customers regularly and -if possible- asking their input at critical junctions.
Keep in mind that most people don’t care about your final decision. They are just excited to have their voices heard. And that’s precisely how you should make your brand community feel: be heard.
3. Any branding project is a change management project
There is a systemic problem with brands: most of the public — and possibly the majority of the corporate world — thinks that a brand is a logo. Starting from that point of view, one comes to a conclusion that “a branding project is a design project.”
In reality, for any organization to embark on a branding journey, something must be ailing. Perhaps the existing brand promise doesn’t work anymore. Maybe there is a new breed of sophisticated and demanding customers. Perhaps the organization is going through mergers or divestitures. Perhaps the company is looking into licensing its brand to create additional revenues.
Regardless of the business catalyst, a company’s decision to rebrand itself is an honest and transparent attempt to change something. A branding project would be perceived successful only if the desired change takes place in the last analysis. That’s why change is the right metaphor to use to define a branding project.
Years ago, GAP launched a new logo design with no warning. People rushed to social media to declare how much they hated the new design. As a result -just six days after putting their new logo out into the public- Gap had to revert to its original design.
Kraft Food Group has a similar story. Just five months after launching their new brand identity, not only they redesigned the logo, but also they had to split the company into two!
Tropicana is yet another example of a brand identity launch going wrong. The juice company’s new identity created so much negativity that the move cost Tropicana around $137 million in sales between January 1st and February 22nd.
All of the above could have been prevented had they:
1. Sold the problem and not the solution,
2. Treated brand identity launch as a democratic process, and
3. Viewed branding as a change management project.
