11 ways to completely sabotage your rebrand.
What is branding and why is it important?
A brand is often thought of as a logo.
It’s very true that a logo is an integral part of any brand and should be a badge of honour, but a brand is so much more than this.
A brand is the clothes your organisation wears. It encompasses every single aspect of your operation, and the touch-points of your organisation to both customers and internal teams.
It includes your visual identity, but also how you do business and what you deliver in terms of products, services and most importantly, experience.
BUT… it’s easy to neglect your brand and here are some classic examples of how your rebrand could be easily sabotaged.
1 – You don’t take the time to understand your audience.
Do you really know what your customers think of you? It’s always healthy and helpful to sense check their perception of you and your brand. It’s actually more helpful to hear about their frustrations than the positives; that way you gain actionable insights to drive your value proposition and deliver your brand promise in the right way. Equally important are those individuals who are part of your target audience but don’t yet know you or your brand. Without this insight you are guessing and, whilst some of that gut feeling will be right, some of it won’t. Understanding what drives customers should help shape what you do, how you do it and why you do it.
2 – You start with the visual.
Branding isn’t just a cosmetic veneer, it’s a representation of how you do business. Your brand shouldn’t be executional, it should be grounded in the strategic drivers of your business. It should also allow you to grow, without outgrowing your brand. That’s why your brand positioning should always come first, and that positioning should be the output of your team – ensuring stakeholders are engaged and managed from the start.
3 – You don’t engage your internal stakeholders.
Brand strategy shouldn’t sit with the marketing team in isolation. It makes their job harder when presenting on something that’s been finalised without any prior engagement. It’s equally hard for the marketing team to second guess any longer term business plans and those should absolutely factor in defining your brand positioning. It’s better (and easier) to take representation from across the business (including anyone from board members to apprentices) to ensure the brand is not only shaped by the people who know it best, but also is believed internally. Great brands are built inside-out, not outside-in.
4 – You launch the new brand without any prior warning to your internal team.
TA-DAH! Here’s our new brand everyone!
This never works and ultimately you’ll find that HR is sticking with the old PowerPoint template and Operations don’t ‘like’ the new colours so are using their own... That’s because you didn’t take them on the journey and they weren’t part of the process. Branding is a science and there should be a reason for everything, but if you don’t explain that then you’re in the realms of subjectivity – which is never a nice place. Teams need to feel listened to and understand why the brand needs to evolve. Otherwise, everyone will just simply ignore it and think it was a complete waste of time and budget.
5 – You pitch the rebrand to agencies and expect visuals as part of that process.
See point 2 above but we’ll elaborate. Your brand and your business are inextricably linked. To understand your business, your vision and your purpose needs time investment and organisation-wide engagement. Without it, your brand is not only executional, it’s a cosmetic veneer and not grounded in your long term strategy. It’s a subjective execution that doesn’t represent you, your beliefs and your reasons for being. That’s why asking an agency to give you concepts is a complete waste of time; your time is better spent asking how they’ll engage your teams, your stakeholders and deliver a brand strategy that’s appropriate to who you are, who you want to be and who you need to speak to.
6 – You don’t have a planned customer journey with specific touchpoints.
Do you know how your customers come into contact with you? Why do they buy from you? Why do they return? Could their experience of your brand be better? If you’ve invested in redefining your brand, then this goes hand-in-hand with the customer journey; ensuring that each touchpoint has a purpose, a consistent experience and delivers on your investment. If you just rebadge everything without interrogating the journey, how do you know if your brand is effective?
7 – You focus on the logo and not the identity system as a whole.
Your brand logo gives a first impression (good or bad) and whilst it is the shorthand of brand experience, a brand needs to work beyond the logomark. A brand should deliver on an identity system that allows you to brand anything, anywhere, and with a consistent experience. We call it consistent flexibility; but your brand should work across a plethora of formats and media and ensure your audience knows you, no matter where they see you. The identity system should cover typography, iconography, graphics, imagery, colours, and tone of voice. A logo should also be distinct from your brand typeface, better still it should be customised or even hand-drawn… There's nothing worse than someone recreating your logo just by typing in Helvetica… it’s got to be unique to you and work with the full system.
8 – You start with the website.
Top-down, bottom-up. It starts (and ends) with branding. If your branding is on point, everything else works – consistently. It’s not just a masthead logo and you can’t just add the brand to a new website; that’s a channel of your brand. Ultimately if you cover the logo up on your website, it should still be recognisably you. Also see point 7 above.
9 – You start with social media.
Just because you’ve had some success on social media, does not mean you have a brand identity. Social media is direct marketing and it’s a channel. Given the media fragmentation of the modern age, your brand is more important than it’s ever been. Get the brand right, the channel marketing follows seamlessly.
10 – You want brand guidelines before you really need them.
When you create a new brand identity it’s important to not only rollout the brand across your key touch points, but also live with it a little. If you dive straight into brand guidelines, chances of it coming unstuck are quite high. If your brand agency does some, or all of the rollout – it becomes much easier to document and refine the templates that will be needed; otherwise it’s academic.
11 – You accept that, internally, the brand guidelines won’t be adhered to.
Start as you mean to go on. Some of the world’s biggest and best brands have brand guardianship written into employee contracts. That’s how important brand consistency is. If you accept from the off that people will change it and there’s nothing you can do about it, then the racehorse will very quickly become a camel… design by committee and feature-creep are never a good idea.
So how do you make a rebrand go smoothly?
Carry out a brand audit.
Define your customers and speak to them.
Engage stakeholders and take them on the journey.
Develop the brand proposition first.
Create a brand beyond a logo and a brand identity system.
Define the customer journey and improve it.
Write the rules and create an approval policy that has to be adhered to.
Find out more about brand strategy here and branding here or contact us to discover how we create a brand at info@truth-design.co.uk