Should you rebrand your company?
Rebranding is hot shit. That’s not news; ever since the great Gap debacle of 2010*, it’s been a topic on which designers, content sites, and armchair critics love to devour, pontificate, rant, rave and speculate. By and large the awareness has been good for us as designers (debateably, it keeps us honest and improves the work) but the high visibility has created an unfortunate side effect: a rash of brands rushing to get on that sweet rebranding PR train without any good reason for doing it and, worse, without understanding what happens when they do it.
To be clear, I’m not blind to the appeal of a rebrand to an internal team. It’s shiny, it’s new, and in some cases it’s the visible marking of your tenure at a company. What I’m saying is: those are all garbage reasons to change because they miss the point of what a brand is to its audience.
You’re messing with people’s brains!
Some Basics
Let’s go over the basics of a brand first; if you’re well-versed, skip down a bit. At its core, a brand is an emotional connection. That connection doesn’t live in your company’s headquarters, it lives inside of the people that use your product or interact with your service. It is their connection, and it’s forged and further gut-checked against everything you put forward. Does everything — logo, typography, colors, copywriting, employee handbook, everything — try to use the same voice and make someone feel the same way? The more consistent the efforts, the more powerful the relationship.
Consistency is crucial
As humans we value consistency in our relationships, be they personal, professional or otherwise. We like consistency because it makes our lives easier. We like knowing what to expect. When there’s a change in someone or something, it forces us to re-examine our relationship. The bigger the change, the more we have to back up to see if we’re still cool. That’s a lot of mental effort. And if it’s a loose relationship, a big enough change could just sever your ties. And just like with people, some consider others when making the change and others, well…
“But we’re all about shaking things up. Disruption is the new norm!” says… well, no one specifically, but it’s an increasingly common sentiment that everything has a decreasingly short shelf life. And while a brand needs to continually evolve to stay relevant, keep in mind the other half of the equation. Just because you want to change doesn’t mean thousands of people (or a helluva lot more) really like what you’ve got currently.
Legacy Effects
When you make a significant change to your brand, there’s also a ripple effect to consider. If you’re doing it right, and have built a brand that really resonates, then your audience have become fans. They’ve got it in their minds. They might also have stickers of it on their laptops, proudly display your logo on their bodies, or have buttons with it on their websites. The point is, they have made you a piece of them. Rebranding takes all of those elements and says “nah, that’s old. That thing you liked? Not cool anymore.” All of the pride they got from it, all of the status they believe you gave them, is now deprecated. You’ve made them look out-of-touch by having “the old one.” To someone who put a lot of effort to align themselves with you, it could seem pretty insulting.
It also means that your old logo is living out there in a lot of places you don’t want it. Websites can’t be bothered to update their social media icons, restaurants don’t care about updating their yelp stickers in their windows, and people who just cared about free swag aren’t going to be hunting down a new t-shirt to replace the old one. If the previous brand was widespread enough, then your new brand has an uphill battle to defeat the old one. And in the interim, your brand isn’t consistent, and that leads to decreased equity.
Okay, so when SHOULD you rebrand?
By this point, it’s pretty clear: changing your brand is a big deal, but there are definitely times when it’s worth the risk.
When you never took the time to do it to begin with
Most often a company just getting off the ground (lookin’ at you, scrappy startups) don’t have things fully figured out. Between quick pivots and spit-and-duct-tape proofs of concept, design can be a bit of an afterthought. You probably have a logo that you got done on the cheap and a look that is a bit off. But once you know where you’re heading, know who your audience is and what your product wants to give them, it’s time to give branding another look, to find a voice that deeply resonates. This should be a pretty intensive exercise where everything is up for change: the look, colors, even the name.
At such an early stage, it seems like the word rebrand should have quotes around it but, whether you realize it or not, even your early users — the ones you might have outright told that this was temporary — will have started making connections with your branding, so the term really does apply. This example is pretty obvious, the following examples are more nuanced.
When you need to refresh
Ideally your brand was created to be true to itself, being able to stand the test of time. But even the best designs are influenced, to varying degrees, consciously or subconsciously, by current trends and contemporary styles. Your audience is still your audience, your strategy is sound and your values are still resonating well, but something just looks a bit old. Like the world moved a few decades and you’re behind. This is where a tweak to catch up can bring you up to speed or, more beneficial to your company, this can be used as an opportunity to ditch trends, focus inward and figure out what’s ownable, and forge what you’ve already got into something stronger.
When you need to shift your voice
As noted above, people evolve and brands need to evolve with them. If your brand is big and recognizable, and you have a sizeable share of the market, sometimes you just needs a slight shift to stay in line with your audience.
When Uber first came out it was billed as a luxury experience, “Everyone’s Private Driver.” Imagery was aspirational, well-dressed models shot in artsy black and white, and the design of the app was slick and clean. It was exactly what it needed to be at the time: the idea of “calling a car” was uncommon and putting this world within your reach made people feel special.
Then came Lyft, telling the same story in a very different way. The pink moustaches and the sitting-in-the-passenger-seat and the fistbumps made the service feel more like sitting with a buddy. It also made the service feel less stuffy, and as a result less expensive (especially with the cost conscious generation). It was a direct attack on Uber and seemed like it was working. Couple this slightly-weakened position with high-visibility knocks to the company’s credibility (and black cars being a rarity), and you have a brand relationship that could do with a shakeup. And so, in February of 2016, they shook it up. Not too much, but enough to make their image friendlier, more accessible, more empowering to the driver AND the rider.
I’ll let Armin Vit’s writeup speak to the particulars of the execution (and the unfortunate situation of having a CEO in-room for the duration of the project), but the decision to move was a sound one, and it went just far enough to change their voice to fit the times, while keeping enough of the original look to not look like a completely different company.
When you’re speaking to a different audience
When analyzing your business, you might realize that you are speaking to the wrong people. Your business is right but attracting a different crowd (or less of the right one than you’d like). You could be an app who needs to speak to an older audience. Or, you could be a cable network realizing that the people watching weren’t coming for the reasons you thought they were. Like Oxygen.
Oxygen was originally most notable for being “the other Lifetime.” Oxygen eventually put their focus on mostly reality shows but over time noted that their Crime Time weekends were attracting the lion’s share of their viewers. Noticing that, they rolled with it and changed their brand to match the wavelength of their viewers, becoming a “multiplatform crime destination brand for women.”
Without looking at data it seems like a strange shift to move in a direction like this but it speaks to a clear understanding of who was really tuning in and what was (and wasn’t) working to make such a bold change to strategy.
When you need to escape your image
This isn’t a case a lot of people like to talk about, but when you’ve got a PR nightmare of a brand and everyone knows it, the best move could be to cut and run from your current brand. Remember Blackwater? The private military contractor that had some people who did some horrible things during the Iraq war? That was a crisis of unshakable proportions. So they changed their name, and look, and did everything to erase their past. There are lots of examples of crisis mitigation to this level. It’s definitely a last-resort maneuver and if you’re in this position, you don’t need this article to tell you to do it.
The obvious ones: corporate mergers, pivots, etc
Finally, there are the changes that are a little more obvious. Anytime a company becomes a new company, changes direction, joins another or has a shakeup of significant size to make people wonder what they are, then they should hold up a mirror and assess who they are now. It doesn’t do much good to keep the original branding because when an audience realizes the foundation of their relationship to a brand has moved out from under them, the connection becomes hollow. For an example of how not to do it, think Comcast/NBC/Universal, or whichever of their current conglomeration exists (I can’t keep it straight). The names are recognizable, there’s still some equity, but currently there’s ZERO to connect with, there’s no brand for someone new to latch onto or even understand.
Tl;Dr:
If you take away one thing from this, it’s that the decision to rebrand is a business decision first and foremost. The impact of the decision effects each and every one of your audience members, and that kind of power should not be wielded frivolously. If you’ve got a real, solid reason to change, then go for it — but only go as far as is necessary, a slight tweak can go a long way!
But if there’s no good reason to change, and you’re just looking to put your stamp on the place you’re working? I dunno, maybe just try to change the colors of your corporate bathrooms or something.
