If you have a brand for your business and it was established, say during the 2000s or prior to that, chances are that you may be looking to rebrand your business now. Why now? Well, thanks to the global event of 2020, a vast majority of businesses are shifting online, and this shift is necessitating a huge need for reinventing their brand identity.
And if you have been thinking about rebranding your business, may be youâre not really sure about how to go about it. And thatâs what weâre going to cover here in this article. Rebranding your business is something that should be intentional, strategic, and should meticulously follow a process to give you desired outcomes.
The following is the 6-Step process you should adopt for rebranding your business to take it to the next level:
1.Purpose & Goals
You need to answer two important first-level questions to complete the first step in the rebranding process:
a) Why are you rebranding your businesses?
b) What do you want to accomplish by rebranding?
Answering these two questions are extremely crucial, as they together determine the depth and width of your rebranding exercise.
Once done, you need to answer another two second-level questions:
i) Why are you doing it now?
ii) What are the various touch points your rebranding will reflect in?
Asking the first question helps you figure out whether the timing to rebrand is right for your business, and the ânowâ in the question gives you a definitive answer.
The second may kind of sound rudimentary, but is not, as it helps you list down the places where the visuals will be different once you complete the rebranding process. It includes:
1.) Logo
2.) Signage
3.) Website & Content
4.) Social Media Platforms
5.) Mobile App
6.) Business Cards
7.) Letterhead
8.) Collaterals
9.) Product Packaging, and
Other things that carry your previous brand previous identity
2. Discovery & Research
This is the most important step in the six-step process of rebranding your business. This involves you to carry out a brand audit, which will invariably provide you with many MOTs (Moments of Truth) for your existing brand.
The great benefit of carrying out this exercise, is that it helps you understand where your brand is strong and where it is not. You figure this out by looking at your competitors, your target audience, and the market landscape, among others.
Whatâs important about this step is that you have to carry it out in a manner that is as objective as possible. And objectivity is the reason why many businesses hire the services of a leading branding agency, who look into the following:
Understand Your Audience
Understand your audience better in terms of:
1.) Who they are?
2.) Do they match the profile who you want your customers to be?
3.) Are there any gaps in who they are and what you want them to be? Or are they the same?
4.) Where do they live?
5.) What age bracket they fall into?
6.) What does their life look like now?
7.) What are their hobbies?
8.) What are their interests?
9.) What makes them tick?
10.) Where do they hang out?
11.) What do they do online?
12.) What social channels do they use online?
13.) What do they do offline?
14.) What are their values?
15.) What are their beliefs?
16.) What are their aspirations?
17.) What problems are they facing?
18.) What is the nature of solution they seek?
19.) Does your product/service directly address their problem?
20.) Do it address their problem/s fully?
21.) What are the aspects your product/service does not address fully?
22.) Can you meet their expectations?
23.) Can you exceed their expectations?
24.) How can you make their experience with your brand memorable?
If you can invest time and find the answers for the above, it will give you a really good head-start to carry out the entire rebranding process with relative ease.
Competition Landscape
This is an exercise that requires you to be honest. Brutally honest, and figure out:
1.) What do your competitors do well?
2.) What they do not do as well as you?
3.) What makes them different from you â for better?
4.) How are you different from them â for better?
5.) What do you need to do to match or even exceed what theyâre good at?
6.) What do you need to do to be ahead of them?
7.) What do you need to do to be ahead of them – consistently?
8.) What you can learn from them?
9.) What they can learn from you?
Once done, you want to look at everything that your current brand has, closely and objectively, including:
1.) Your visual identity
2.) Your marketing
3.) Your websites
4.) Your social media
5.) Your message
6.) Your business premises
7.) Your signage
This exercise will also help you figure out whether you need a complete overhaul of your brand, or whether you need to rebrand as you retain certain elements from your current brand. May be you want none of the elements to stay or you may want few of the elements to stay. Having said, you can figure out exactly what you want only when you carry out this process.
A simple way to carry out this exercise, practically speaking, is to put things on a piece of paper across three columns:
a) What is working well (which you may choose to retain)?
b) What is not working well (which you need to eliminate)?
c) What changes do I need to make (so that you can improve)?
3. Develop Your Strategy
As an outcome of the processes mentioned above, by now, you will have a fair idea about who your competitors are, and where the gaps are. And depending on the extent to which you will be rebranding yourself, you will know how deep and wide youâre willing to go to accomplish it.
With that in mind, you need to (re)look at your purpose, your vision, your mission, your values, and your positioning in the market. This helps you to decide how youâre going to stand out from the crowd (read âcompetitorsâ) and what kind of brand positioning youâre going to adopt.
This means you will look at your brand personality, archetype, attributes, and how you can start to develop the essence that is at the core of your (re)branding.
4.Bringing Your Brand to Life
One of the important elements of brand strategy is identifying the brand archetype mix, which helps in bringing your brand to life. You may wonder why this process is required. Well, place two brands next to each other, and you have two different personalities.
They may both be similar products. However, it is only by adopting the differentiation in your brand personality will you be able to employ your brand language, communication, tone of voice, and messaging. Once done, the next aspect that businesses consider in rebranding, is the visual identity.
5.Define Your Visual Identity
The time is now right to figure out your visual identity, as you do have a clear understanding of your market landscape, competitors, and most of all, how you want to differentiate yourself from the rest. At this point therefore, you’ll have a fair idea and reasonably good indicators about how your visual identity has to be, how to bring it together, and how you can start putting them in place.
Your visual identity should be simple, appropriate, distinctive, and most of all, memorable. Simply put, it is an anchor for your brand. Itâs a visual cue. A visual hook if you will. It is to make your brand to stand out when it is placed next to others.
Defining your visual identity enables you to set the mood of your brand, and how you want your audience to feel when they are introduced to it. Based on the same, you can use graphical elements to visually communicate and explain about your brand.
6.Rollout & Promotion
You have got your rebranding tasks done, and the time has come to bring out your brand in the open for the whole world to see. The real action begins from now on, as itâs time to roll out your (re)brand across all your touch points as discussed in step 1.
It is time to not only introduce but also educate your audience about your brand. This means you need to communicate with them, and communicate with them consistently. In other words, itâs time for your rollout and promotion, and you need to do it effectively across all your touch points. Most of all, itâs time to make sure that the time and effort youâve put into the rebranding exercise actually takes the shape as desired.
Having said, it is important to remember that the rollout and promotion exercise is not something thatâs done overnight. It needs clarity, focus, and consistency in execution. Simply put, the new direction youâre taking for your business through the rebranding exercise takes time.
As they say: Good things take time.