Following Google’s announcement that it plans to rebrand under new parent company Alphabet, Rebecca Scully, managing director of Smarts Illuminate, reveals seven tips to ensure your next rebrand is a success
HSBC’s decision to rebrand its retail banking operations in the UK is a bold step that could help to restore customer trust and strengthen the brand’s customer appeal at a difficult time. The move has been prompted by regulatory changes, which are requiring UK banks to separate their consumer deposits from their investment banking activities by 2019. But as with all rebrands, there are risks attached and success is by no means guaranteed.
Of course, the reasons that companies decide to go ahead with a rebrand are many and varied. In today’s ultra-competitive markets, most companies realise that staying the same is unlikely to bring success. While they may not need a complete overhaul, brands can benefit from incremental improvements as long as the changes are based on real understanding and geared to strengthening its appeal or reaching out to new markets.
Most businesses don’t have the luxury of in-depth knowledge about perceptions of their brand. For this reason, the decision to go ahead with a rebrand is often based on a belief that it is out of date or no longer reflects the full breadth of the company’s activities. There may also be a lack of consistency in the way staff communicate about the business.
Here are some steps businesses can take to ensure their rebrand is a success:
1. Take stock of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses
Do you really know what is good about your brand and how it is perceived in your target markets? And do you know where any problems lie? Such insights are an essential starting point for any rebrand.
2. Seek opinions
Seek the opinions of customers, staff and industry partners and make sure you are basing your decisions on sound information and insights. Are customers satisfied with the products and/or services you are providing and do their perceptions of your offer match internal ones? If not, there could be a fundamental disconnect, which is undermining the business that the rebrand should aim to solve.
3. Know your target market
You may think this is obvious, but are you thinking widely enough? Most businesses will know the markets where they are performing most strongly but are they seeing the big picture? Should your brand be pursuing other sectors of the market and are some markets getting bigger while others are contracting? You need to be clear about where your brand is now and where it would like to be in the future.
4. Ensure products are aligned to customers’ needs
This should be part of your action plan for change. Are you offering customers and prospects what they want or do you need to introduce any new products? You may need to consider how to repackage part of your offering or how to tailor it to suit a specific sector where there is an opportunity to strengthen your customer base.
5. Using allies
Do you have industry partners or affiliates who can support your business in reaching out to new or existing markets more effectively? It could be that your core offering of products and/or services is well aligned to customers’ needs but despite all your marketing efforts, they are just not coming across your brand for some reason.
6. Effective communication is vital
Ultimately there is no point in changing anything if you are not going to tell your target markets about it or work at instilling the change internally. You should be able to communicate the reasons for the rebrand clearly across your target audiences and deliver messages in an engaging way. Do you have an opportunity to get in front of customers to tell them all about it and could you create a video to share with staff internally? Such tactics will help to spread the word that your business has changed for the better.
7. Get legal protection
Before making any significant change to a brand identity, appropriate searches should be carried out to ensure that it will be possible to secure the necessary legal protection. You should consider protecting things like the name of the business, domain names, app store names, company names, logos and other designs that you consider part of the brand identity.
