Ruin a Rebranding in 5 Steps

Today, competition is heating up and consumer spending is down. It’s a natural tendency for businesses to look to changing their Brand through a rebranding exercise, rather than looking at themselves and making a real change.

Like trading your bathroom mirror for a fun house one rather than just hitting the gym, rebranding without rethinking is a recipe for a very expensive disaster. Here are our top 5 ways to ruin a rebranding.

1. Lack of True Change

Rebranding with snazzy new graphics and re-written content is a start. The new image will motivate people to take a fresh look at you—and people’s primary motivation in taking a new look is to see what’s changed.

If you’re the same old place dressed up in new wrapping and ribbons, you’ll merely confirm your former position and you’ll have wasted a valuable opportunity to change their perceptions.

2. Making Too Big a Leap

Executives can often get a little caught up in their own vision of where the company could be and lose touch with where the company should be. When rebranding, keep your primary focus on the achievable, not the aspirational. If you make too big a leap, your market simply won’t believe you.

3. Lack of Internal Alignment

If rebranding is an initiative implemented solely by the marketing department, it’s likely to fail. Include all facets of the business from sales and customer service to engineering and manufacturing.

Of course all that input is useless if management doesn’t listen. Internal alignment will provide valuable insight into what the company is, rather than what management might like to think it is.

4. Failure of the Champion

While rebranding may be born in the marketing department, unless the CEO is the champion of that effort, it will likely die there. As the chief branding officer, the CEO needs to set the vision and lead the charge, ensuring that products, services, people, and resources are aligned to deliver on the promises implied in the rebranding.

5. Failure to Clarify Positioning

Rebranding should always clarify and refine your positioning. Your goal in rebranding should be to make it easier for customers and prospects to understand exactly why your company should be one of their top choices, why there are few credible substitutes for your company in the market. This isn’t the place for puffery. Merely claiming to be the best is meaningless—and using empty words like “best value” and “exceptional customer service” do nothing but create more skepticism.

As a rule of thumb in rebranding, if the change doesn’t scare you a little, it’s probably not a meaningful change.