Have you considered embarking on a rebranding campaign? Whether your company is big or small, it’s always an option and can be a great way to generate renewed interest in your brand. However, there is a right and wrong way to do it, as you might have seen with the “death” of Twitter’s bird logo, Larry.
So, how do you avoid the pitfalls of rebranding and make sure you don’t get backlash or send money down the drain? Take a look at our tips to get started:
Do it for the right reasons
There is a wrong reason to rebrand. In fact, there are many reasons that should stop you in your tracks right away. By pausing for thought, you’ll save a lot of time and money on a project that might not make a profitable difference in certain circumstances.
Bad reasons to consider rebranding include boredom, like simply needing a change or because other problems you can’t change are bothering you, or to cover up a crisis. Audiences are going to see right through your attempt to sweep a bad reputation under the rug. Take Hermes for example. If you mention Evri today, you’re going to get the same grumblings about lost packages and no access to a customer service team, just with a new name attached. Hermes’ reputation didn’t leave with its name.
Additionally, new marketing managers might want to make a statement and think that rebranding is the way to go about it. If this is simply about feeding an ego, then it could cost the company money .
What will this rebrand actually change?
What are the good reasons to implement a rebrand? Well, there are lots, like a merger, a repositioning into new markets or locations, or a new philosophy.
Start by asking yourself three questions: What are you doing? How do you plan to do it? Why are you doing it? Then move on to how you intend to communicate that to your audience.
There are four areas to hit to understand for yourself what your company’s rebranding is for: your company’s vision, mission, values, and brand voice. Vision is what you’re doing, while mission is how you will do it. It’s important to nail down your company’s vision before you move on to the rest. Your mission will be carried on in your new branding, like “We expect to offer the best customer service”, which is the vision, “by improving staff training and expanding our team”, which is the mission. From there, you can move on to values, which explains why you are doing this. Why is customer service the thing you’ve chosen to focus on?
All of this will be expressed in your brand voice. Think about the vocabulary, the tone, and the language you use in your branding, and ensure that the principles behind it, like “professional” or “casual” are applied to everything else in your rebranding.
Think about the message, not just the logo
Instinctively, the first step, as a certain emerald mining billionaire just demonstrated, might be to slap a new logo and name on your new company and think that the hard work is over. Twitter became X and therefore all the problems of its spam, its hateful content, its adult content, are all gone, right?
The main mistake Elon Musk has made is to not add a message with his logo. What does the X represent? If you were to ask the public, it represents a dying social media account, whereas Musk would want you to think that it represents a “super app” made up of stocks and AI capabilities. However, we see no progress on these stocks or AI features, so at the moment it’s just a new logo on an old concept. Musk hasn’t got his ducks in a row, the last one being the aesthetics, and you should have this covered to achieve maximum results.
Think about what you want to say with your aesthetics. Do you want to enforce an idea like Nike’s swoosh, the name meaning “victory” and the logo evoking the idea of being fast? Or do you want to push forward a promise to customers, like a bright future that involves X, Y, and Z, “as evidenced by our work in 1, 2, and 3”? Putting the logo before the changes to the company is very much like putting the cart before the horse.
Find more ideas on how to handle your rebrand here.
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