“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” – Winston Churchill. This could very well be a marketer’s creed: improving, iterating, and trending towards perfection should be our overall goal.
Sure, switching up your email marketing strategy is an easy choice when you’re tracking the right metrics. But switching up your whole brand? That’s hard.
That’s because brand awareness, brand recognition, and brand equity are hard-won and incrementally built. Your customers might even have a strong emotional attachment to your brand (if you’re doing it right, they will). This can lead to disappointment and even outrage when you change the basis of your brand: who among us doesn’t feel a pang of nostalgia for Twitter’s blue bird logo?
Given the challenges of rebranding, you have to ask why would a business want to rebrand? Well, despite the costs, there’s a huge amount to be gained from rebranding a company at the right time. When you implement an effective rebrand strategy you can connect with new customers without alienating your old ones, and create a new, powerful platform for your business.
Why Would a Business Want to Rebrand?
We’re all familiar with our favorite B2C brands, from the irreverent Oatly to cutting-edge Apple. But branding is no less important in the B2B landscape and building a powerful brand personality can be just as rewarding for B2B leadership.
Consider Slack’s playful name and colorful tones, which encourages the effective workplace communication that their feature-rich platform facilitates. Or Hubspot’s firm grip on expertise and excellence in all things small business, allowing it to dominate the CRM and business growth space.
These examples demonstrate the selling force of a strong B2B brand. In fact, brand building is one of the main focuses of B2B marketing leaders, 84% of whom place brand awareness as their top priority, and 77% agree that branding is critical to growth.
That’s because branding gets your name out: even in a digital age, word-of-mouth recommendations play a role in the decision-making of 91% of B2B buyers.
Branding isn’t just important: it should be at the forefront of your marketing strategy.
When your brand isn’t working as hard as you are, creating an emotional connection with your customers, reinforcing your unique selling position and creating top-of-mind awareness, a rebrand — or brand refresh — must be considered.
When to Consider Rebranding Your Business
In essence, there are two reasons to rebrand. Both are about movement: either away from outdated or problematic elements of your former brand, or towards a new vision that better defines your business and reaches new markets.
Rebranding moves away from brand elements that are holding you back, or simply associated with an old version of your mission, vision and values. Simultaneously, you move towards an identity that highlights your unique selling proposition with better relevance to your user base and target audience. Build a clearer alignment between brand character and your business mission to present an updated vision of your business’s purpose, and of its future.
1) Moving Away from Outdated Elements
Times change, and sometimes your brand must change with it. The list of rebrands away from old-fashioned or problematic brand elements is endless, from sports teams to pancake mixes.
In the B2B world, our brands are rarely so close to the bone, but in a fast-paced digital world, design elements can easily become outdated. Dropbox’s 2017 rebrand injected color and energy into an increasingly stale-feeling brand, and in doing so it captivated its audience once more.
2) Redefining your USP
Your brand should communicate your unique selling position (USP) to your customers, helping them solve problems in creative and effective ways. As we grow, our USP often changes — small parts of our business grow into central products, or our initial offerings become sidelined.
This is particularly true in the wake of the AI wave, and every B2B brand needs to reflect on how it positions its products and services in 2024. Hubspot, for example, now defines itself as “an AI-powered customer platform”. This works for its precision-sharp branding based on knowledge and professionalism, but for smaller businesses with branding that emphasizes a personal touch, centralising AI in your product could confuse your brand identity, or call for a brand makeover.
3) Reaching New Audiences
Your brand must connect with your customers, connecting your product or service with their own identities, and building an emotional resonance that strengthens loyalty. Rebranding allows you to expand into new markets, communicate the value of your services to a new audience, or even strengthen a connection with your existing customers.
Data analytics firm Vi3’s 2019 rebrand not only changed its name. It also created a new, streamlined look that made real-time data analytics less intimidating. The former name, Valmarc, and the associated identity, had a stuffy feel that appealed to statisticians. By rebranding, Vi3 created an approachable identity that made complex number-crunching accessible to small businesses.
How to Retain Brand Equity When Rebranding Your Company
While there’s much to gain from a rebrand, a mismanaged rebrand process can alienate your existing customers and burn up hard-won brand equity. But you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater: whether you’re renaming and positioning your brand or going for a timely brand refresh to update your image, you can retain your brand equity through a strategic rebrand process.
Positively Frame Your Rebranding
As we’ve seen, your rebrand should be driven by purpose: moving away from outdated brand elements, and towards a clear vision, mission and positioning in your industry. Communicating the reasons for your rebrand to stakeholders, including your existing customer base, is crucial to maintaining brand equity.
Consider a rebrand a journey, and bring your customers along for the ride.
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It’s particularly important to control the messaging when you’re moving away from a brand associated with past failings, like when Facebook rebranded under the umbrella banner of Meta.
If you’re not distancing yourself from old controversy, your rebranding announcement is an opportunity to reaffirm your origin story and set the stage for your continuing evolution.
Maintain a Linear Identity
Consistency is key to a strong brand — even in the face of change. Your rebranding process should include a thorough brand audit to identify the elements of your former brand and design that can be carried forward to provide a sense of continuity to your audience.
Here’s an example from when my company rebranded from squadhelp.com to atom.com:
Before: squadhelp.com
After: atom.com. Continuity in design maintains brand equity with our community.
We changed our name but maintained a connection to our past identity through design elements. This minimized any alienation of our existing community of sellers and creatives, while allowing our new brand identity to appeal to a wider audience in the startup ecosystem.
Design isn’t the only way to create continuity throughout the rebranding process: your products, services and toolkits can connect your past and future identities in creative ways. As we broadened the scope of our offerings, our AI-powered domain appraisal tool connects a core community of domain sellers with our wider audience of startups and entrepreneurs.
Present a Vision for Your Future
Having established a connection to your past, it’s time to communicate a vision for your future. By clearly articulating your new direction, and the core mission of your updated brand, you can excite your existing customers all while creating a splash that engages a new target audience.
Adobe’s 2020 rebrand excelled in this regard. At the surface level, the move modernized both product names and design elements, but on a deeper level it allowed for a rearranged hierarchy of products.
Adobe’s forward-looking rebrand was communicated as an exciting evolution, placing a cloud-based model at the forefront of its services. This disguised a fundamental change to its revenue framework and facilitated a transition to a SaaS subscription model, but Adobe retained customer loyalty and trust by articulating a modernizing vision that connected with its creative user base.
Brand-Building: A Long Term Project
Whether you’re launching a new business or rebranding a company with existing brand equity, brand-building is always a long-term project. Your rebranding strategy should focus on creating a linear narrative that links past and future and articulating an exciting vision for the future. Center your unique market position and connect to the problem you’re solving for new and old customers alike.
Never forget that when you look closer at your target audience of businesses and organizations, there’s a human at the heart of every interaction. Rebranding allows you to connect to those individuals, creating an emotional channel that converts, retains and reinforces loyalty.
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