10 Common Mistakes When Rebranding

A successful rebranding should make your company or product stand out and dominate your market. It should make you a beacon of your industry.

But plenty of companies that set out to rebrand end up falling well short of their own or their investors’ expectations. And even when expectations are met, these companies have often squandered the opportunity to meaningfully improve their internal culture and their commercial results.

When that happens, it’s usually down to one or more of these avoidable mistakes.

Not thinking big enough

1. “It’s just a design change.”

2. “I don’t like the color of our logo anymore.”

3. “Let’s just update the website.”

The top culprit in missed opportunities is treating rebranding as a visual exercise. Maybe someone on the internal project team also suggests a clever new tagline. That’s the whole scope, and that’s the problem.

4. Not knowing what your product really does or stands for

5. Not knowing what your customer thinks your product is

Our client engagements include significant research, and one line of inquiry always focuses on the product: what it is, what it does, what else it could do, and how customers actually use it. A 360-degree review of the offering, to understand its full potential. Most failed rebrands never attempt this — often because it doesn’t occur to the team that these are open questions.

Going it alone and getting lost

6. Not asking for help

Nobody knows everything, and good leaders know this. What they often fail to appreciate is the value of outside counsel. Just as you shouldn’t exclude your internal stakeholders, you shouldn’t rely solely on them: they’re steeped in your culture, can’t always see the forest for the trees, and are constrained by reporting lines and existing incentives. External help brings guidance and accountability, multiplies internal knowledge, and — not incidentally — speeds things up and helps you hit the deadline.

7. Too many cooks in the kitchen

Someone in our network described an internal rebranding effort that started with a team of about ten and grew past twenty-five over six months. The result made no lasting impact on their own teams, their customers, or the market. It fizzled out.

8. Changing course at the last minute

Rebranding takes time to work. Messages have to be repeated and sink in. Culture needs to adjust. Products might need to adjust too. Roll-outs have to be planned and prepared. Last-minute knee-jerk changes are poison for all of it — the fastest way to lose whatever momentum you had.

Stopping too soon

9. Forgetting to win the hearts and minds of your employees

A rebrand requires everyone in the company to pull in one new direction — to speak with one voice, in a way that’s natural for their role and personality. If you haven’t won over your own people first, they can’t carry the new story to your customers. And if they can’t, you don’t win your customers either. Buyers don’t buy specs. Even in B2B, the buying decision is ultimately an emotional one.

10. Not having a communications strategy

Your rebrand isn’t finished until the world has heard about it. Launching that redesigned website from the top of this list isn’t enough. Projects fail on execution when there’s no messaging and communications plan behind them — including PR, marketing, and advertising as appropriate for your market. You have to tell the world, in a way that it will actually hear.

In short

Think big. Get help. See it through. Then reap the rewards.

If you’re heading into one of these — or already in the middle of one that isn’t landing — that’s a good conversation to have early.