In our first blog on rebranding, we focused on what branding is and why it’s so important for your company. Now you’re ready to take the long-awaited next step: you’ve decided it is in fact time to rebrand your company. Hooray! But where do you start? Let’s break it down together.
It’s Time to Rebrand—7 Ways to Kickstart Your Strategy
Establish a Rebrand Team
Assess Your Current Branding
Review Your Current Marketing Strategy
Determine Legalities and Logistics
Plan the Visual and Design Aspects
Implement Your New Branding
Perform Quality Assurance Checks
Your choice of team is mission-critical! Your team members will be responsible for making sure your project stays in scope. Picking several varied people with different skill sets is best, so including individuals from marketing, creative, project management, and sales is our recommended approach. This team will also introduce fresh creative perspectives and help you see your rebranding opportunities through a new lens. For example, a sales representative may be a great choice to present the rebranding ideas to some loyal customers to get valuable feedback.
Other key elements of your team, like marketing, design, and sales, will ensure that any creative assets align with your strategy and vision.
Assess Your Current Branding
In this phase, you will be reviewing your existing brand to discover a few things
- Where is your current brand succeeding?
- Where is your current brand failing?
- What improvements need to be made to improve or grow your brand?
By answering these questions, you not only create a direction and goal for your rebranding efforts but also gain insights and ideas for upcoming changes and enhancements. It’s also worth noting everywhere your brand is being utilized at this stage—this will make the implementation process later much easier.
Review Your Current Marketing Strategy
Remember how we mentioned earlier how having a diverse team heading up your efforts would be beneficial? Your marketing representative will be a great resource in this step, as the marketing strategy may also need to be revisited and refreshed.
Things to consider here are:
- Your brand name
- Your mission, vision, and values
- Your personas and target audience
- Your brand voice
Your marketing guru will be able to ensure any visual rebranding stays true to your company’s strategy.
Determine Legalities and Logistics
So, you’ve got your team. You’ve done your assessment. You’ve reviewed your marketing strategy. Now, it’s your project manager’s time to shine! The ideal choice for this role is someone detail-oriented and deadline driven to make sure everything runs smoothly and on time, both internally and externally.
As far as logistics go, you’ll need to have someone overseeing and helping develop these key aspects:
Internal Communications Plan
It’s pretty easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of a rebrand and forget to ask for internal feedback from everyone in your company. The more constructive feedback, the greater chance for success. You may even get some feedback on items you hadn’t considered (such as overlooking the email signature change or adding one if you aren’t already using one).
Establishing Deadlines and Milestones
Rebranding is a detailed undertaking with a lot of moving parts. Having a project manager that can visualize the workflow of deliverables and break the endeavor into manageable parts is crucial. Creating team wins along the way will keep everyone motivated as well—and who doesn’t like a reason to celebrate a win?
In the legal realm, you may want to either hire a lawyer or involve someone in your internal legal team. If your current brand is trademarked, you will need someone who can handle the resubmission of the new logo and the paperwork involved with that to ensure you’re following all required guidelines.
Plan the Visual and Design Aspects
It’s time for your creative and marketing team members to shine! This is where all that hard work starts paying off. In this phase, you will be redesigning core elements of your brand, including:
- Logo – Development of the ‘new you’ happens here. As the logo is being developed, your creatives will be keeping in mind all the different forms your logo needs to take; digital, vertical, stacked, reverse, one-color, with a tagline, without, glyph or icon only, etc.
- Brand colors – If you are updating these as well, your creatives will need to refer to the competitor research to make sure the colors they want to use aren’t identical to your main competitors (hint, your marketing people can help with this as they’ve already done the competitor research). Ideally, you’ll have one to two primary colors, a few accent colors, and a font color.
- Typography – Revisit the fonts you are currently using. How many do you use? Are they outdated? Are they web-safe? Picking no more than two fonts to use on all your materials will ensure your brand looks cohesive across all channels.
- Photography and Illustration – Review your current photography, illustrations, and icons. Do they still speak to your target audience and demographics? It most likely is time to update some of these assets as well.
- Messaging and Tone – Over time, audiences change, especially if you have been around for 30+ years. As old generations fade and new ones become your target, messaging and tone needs to evolve as well.
And here’s where the magic happens…you’ve just created all the elements you need for your brand guide! This becomes the brand bible if you will and should be shared company-wide and externally with any vendors or partners that touch your brand.
Implement Your New Branding
Enter your stellar project manager again! With your new brand guide established, it’s now time to create the implementation plan based on priority. A good approach is to list all of the places your logo/colors/typography appears and have your content team review the messaging across all channels you use. Don’t forget to revisit keywords/SEO.
Now, make a list of how you want to roll out the updates. Start with the most important first (for example, your website, stationery, and presentation templates), and work down to the small items (like email signatures). Assign the appropriate people to assist with the updates and watch the magic happen!
Perform Quality Assurance Checks
We saved the best for last. You’ve done the hardest part: implementation! Now it’s time to finish on a strong note with quality assurance checks. This is a crucial step, so make sure you ask for fresh eyes to review all elements in this stage to ensure nothing was overlooked.
Asking these questions is a great way to start the quality assurance stage of your rebrand:
- Did you update your invoices?
- How about your signage?
- Did your development team update email addresses and log-ins?
After you make sure you’ve covered all of the elements of your rebrand, it’s time to celebrate!
Ready to Rebrand?
A rebrand can be overwhelming, but having a structured plan with goals and deadlines will help keep everything running smoothly. To help, we’ve developed a download to guide you through some of the initial steps. If you find it’s just too much, we’d be happy to assist!
