How to nail your rebrand

When you are in the middle of a rebrand, it can feel like you are being sucked into a world of confusion and over-inspiration, if there is such a thing. It can leave you feeling vulnerable and paranoid, questioning whether you should have started the process in the first place. You might even start thinking there was nothing wrong with the original brand in the first place…

But, you remind yourself, your business is blooming and growing thus, you needed to rebrand in order to bring the new shape of business to your customers. So, as your pour over rebranded banner stands and other printed pieces of kit, knowing that you have it nailed is essential.

Here are some top tips of nailing your rebrand – and preserving your sanity…

It’s all in the planning

Hopefully, you will have spent some time working through the whole concept of rebranding before you took your first few tentative steps. You may have done this, and you may have spent hours planning its execution but mid-rebrand, it can feel like an enormous black hole is about to swallow you whole.

Just like you started the process with planning, when you feel that the chaos is about to overwhelm you, you need to do the same – take yourself off out of the office, stay off email and your phone, to sit and work through what is best for your business NOW. Go back to the original plan, and refocus on where you are, as well as reviewing the steps thus far.

Be creative

When we are under pressure, there is a propensity for knee-jerk reactions; in other words, you might try and fix something as the answer to the problem.

The issue here is that the problem may not be a problem, and it may not need fixing and there may be no need for an answer. In other words, what is happening is part of the process and rather than fixing, you may need to steer it.

Refer back

Hopefully, you will have started this rebrand process with a written brief that includes why it is being done, the need for it and what the rebrand will look and feel like.

Maintaining this brief in your mind’s eye will help you bring it back to where you need your re-brand to be at. This whole process should be based on three basic steps: research, strategy and evaluation.

• Research

Using a kind of Strength/Weakness/Opportunities/Threats analysis, you can work out where your brand it at and where it needs to be. You need to take into account customer and public expectations (we’ll refer back to this later in the piece), as well as taking into account competition and so on. As part of this process, you will also set the budget for rebranding, taking into account you will need to re-print everything, from banner stands to business cards and so on.

• Strategy

This is your plan of action of what is happening when, who is responsible and when it needs to happen buy. You will often find in the rebranding process that there is a sequence or a chain of events – before one thing can happen, three things need to have happened first and before they can happen something else needs to change. It is like a process that forever swings forwards and backwards!

This is why having a schedule of event is key but, just as important as implementing a timetable is the regular monitoring of it. If you see the schedule slipping, you need to wrestle it back on track – sometimes easier said than done…

• Evaluation

Many people assume that this is a process that is done at the very end of a rebrand. However, to really nail your rebrand on time and on budget, you need to be constantly evaluating and reviewing what is happening.

You can stick to the schedule and your overall strategy by making small changes to the process here and there.

A rebrand can take anything from overnight (unlikely) to several months. Many companies choose to phase in a new brand, whereas other businesses need to announce it in one whole swoop to their customers. This could be because you are expanding by buying into another business or you have received significant investment which is driving this rebranding forward.

Either way, you need to be confident and aware that not all your customers will love the rebranded business. Changing your logo, for example, can bring about criticism from customers. People are not keen on change and rebranding can be a rocky road to acceptance…