𝗜𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴?
A business in need of a fresh brand concept might benefit greatly from rebranding. Rebranding may be explored for a variety of reasons, and a majority of them stem from a desire to reposition the company in the marketplace. You may have also outgrown your brand, or you may be struggling to set yourself apart from your competition. Whatever the cause, a company must eventually consider how to rebrand in a way that achieves the intended commercial outcome.
📌 Benefits of Rebranding
Consider the following benefits of rebranding:
1️⃣ Rebranding Can Attract New Customers
After some time in the market, your brand may have grown stagnant, and perhaps even irrelevant to your new target market. While your company's mission and vision may have evolved over time to meet the particular demands and problems of your consumers, your brand may not. You will attract new consumers and renew interest by rebranding your image, corporate personality, or target audience.
By 2003, LEGO fell out of favour with their target audience — kids — and was crippled in debt. With a customer-centric approach at heart, LEGO transformed its brand by co-creating with its fans to become a fun, creative and imaginative brand. They also reengaged kids and parents via the right digital channels. Not only did this rebranding strategy contribute to 4x growth over the next decade, it also renewed LEGO and its popularity.
2️⃣ Rebranding Keeps Your Business Relevant
The purpose of rebranding is to keep your brand relevant. New design trends influence how potential and present consumers view your firm and its offerings. It is important to ensure your appearance is constantly on point and following the trends, as this demonstrates to your consumers that you are aware of industry trends.
3️⃣ Rebranding Differentiates You From the Competition
Rebranding is one of the most effective ways to differentiate your company's services and approach. If you want to rebrand to differentiate yourself from your competition, you should concentrate on what you have to offer that is different from what your competitors have.
From our experience working on the ground with a luxury automobile brand, they initially positioned their brand as masculine to differentiate themselves from their competitors. This ultimately resulted in half of their potential audience being left untapped. By redefining and repositioning their brand, the company now has female followers and a loyal female customer base, while still maintaining differentiation from competitors.
📌 Poor Rebranding Impacts Consumer Trust
With all the benefits of rebranding in mind, it is also important for your business to keep in mind that customers are generally resistant to change, especially when it comes all at once. Customers are emotionally attached to your brand, and a major rebranding may cause your customers to lose faith in your business and feel detached from it. This ultimately results in diminished brand equity. A customer's brand trust is similar to any other relationship, in that it takes effort to develop and maintain.
Changing all branding aspects including the logo, motto, colours, and image might make customers feel disconnected from the company or cause them to lose recognition. So, what can you do?
📌 How to Rebrand While Preserving Brand Equity
1️⃣ Ensure That There Is a Sound Business Reason
Any rebranding project should begin with a solid grasp of the rebranding's commercial purpose. Is it motivated by a desire to expand faster? Is it necessary for your company to fight against larger, more established competitors?
Some of these business cases are simple to construct, such as a merger between two companies. Others, like outgrowing your image, are more subtle. You risk wasting a significant amount of resources if you are unclear about the business justification for the endeavour.
2️⃣ Constant Communication
Change is frightening, and as mentioned earlier, customers are typically resistant to change. When undergoing a rebranding project, it is important to keep your customers informed about what's going on through press releases, publishing announcements on social media, and sending email newsletters.
Communication is required not just externally, but internally too. This is to ensure that all employees and internal stakeholders are aware of how to correctly portray the brand. With constant communication, your brand will be able to garner the necessary support from your audience and internal stakeholders in order for the rebranding project to be a success.
3️⃣ Set Aside a Budget
A comprehensive rebranding is not cheap. Prepare to invest money on a creative rebranding plan, and complement it with marketing and advertising efforts to help your rebranding project succeed. It is well worth the investment to guarantee that your rebranding project is done well.
However, it's critical to be clear about your goals before getting started, and to be as open as possible throughout the change. It's ideal to have two or more rounds of design and feedback input to finetune the rebranding, even if you like the initial draft.
4️⃣ Execute the Rebranding on All Channels
Update all channels of communication with your new brand, including your website, email templates, social media, print materials, and partner materials. It is important to make the change across all channels quickly, so your brand does not communicate two different brands at the same time.
5️⃣ Constantly Monitor Progress and Feedback
Keep in mind that developing and refining the messaging and markets for your rebranding is a continuous activity. It is important to reassess your rebranding approach on a regular basis and to monitor feedback, to ensure that you stay on track and that everything is executed correctly according to plan.
📌 Ready to Refresh Your Brand?
You’ve come to the right place!
VKT offers a full-fledged 360° Digital Marketing Programme focused at accelerating your company's growth. Expect not only solutions in Branding, but also a variety of other services ranging from Performance Marketing to Social Media Management.
With our experienced EDG Certified Consultant, VKT boasts a proven track record in achieving a high EDG application success rate that grants your business up to 70% funding for SMEs and 50% for non-SMEs. So wait no longer, and contact us for a virtual coffee chat to discover more about how you may start your branding journey and leverage our expertise!
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