10 Common Mistakes when Rebranding
A successful rebranding should make your company or product stand out and dominate your markets. It should make you a beacon of your industry.
But many companies that set out to rebrand themselves or their flagship products end up falling woefully short of their own or their investors’ expectations. And even when their own expectations are met these companies may have, by all accounts, squandered the opportunity to more significantly improve their internal culture and their overall commercial results.
When this happens, it’s often attributable to one or more of these common and 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.”
Probably the top culprit in missed opportunities is seeing rebranding as merely a visual or a design exercise. Maybe someone on the internal project team also suggests a clever new tagline.
4. Not knowing what your product really does or stand for
5. Not knowing what your customer thinks your product is
Our typical client engagements include significant research portions and one crucial line of inquiry always focuses on the product, what it is, what it does, what else it could do and how customers use it. In other words, we conduct a 360 degree review of our client’s offering to fully understand its potential. Most failed rebranding exercises we have found do not even attempt this, often because it doesn’t occur to the teams that they should ask such questions.
Going it alone and getting lost
6. Not asking for help
Nobody knows everything. Good leaders know this, of course. But what they often fail to appreciate is the immense value of outside counsel. Just like you shouldn’t exclude your internal stakeholders you shouldn’t rely solely on them. They’re steeped in your company culture and often can’t see the forest for the trees or are limited by reporting lines and your existing incentives. Bringing in external help provides guidance, accountability and multiplies your internal knowledge by that of the outside team, increasing your success chances exponentially. It also speeds things up and helps to deliver on deadline.
7. too many cooks in the kitchen
Someone in our network recently told us about an internal rebranding exercise in a company they know that started with a team of about ten and increased to more than 25 people over the course of half a year. The result did not make any lasting impact within their own teams, with their customers and with the market: the effort fizzled out.
8. Changing course at the last minute
Rebranding requires time to be successful. Messages have to be repeated and sink in, culture needs to adjust, products might have to adjust, too. Messaging and roll-outs have to be planned and prepared. Making last-minute knee-jerk changes is pure poison for this. It’s the safest way to lose all the momentum you might have had in your project and to get lost along the way.
Stopping too soon
9. Forgetting to win the hearts and minds of your employees
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” We all know this line, but how does it apply here? Simple: a rebranding requires everyone in the company to pull in one new direction. To speak with one voice, appropriate and natural for their position and personality. If you don’t first win the hearts and minds of your own employees they can’t translate the new brand strategy to your customers. The result? You don’t win the hearts and minds of your customers. And if you haven’t yet heard, customers don’t buy specs anymore. Even in B2B settings, a buying decision is ultimately an emotional one.
10. Not having a communications strategy
Your rebranding project isn’t finished until the world has heard about it. Launching that redesigned website from the top of this list is not enough. These kinds of projects fail on execution when you don’t prepare a messaging and communications strategy. This includes PR, marketing and advertising as appropriate for your particular product and market environment. You need to tell the world, in a way that it will hear it.
In short:
Think Big
Get Help
See it through
…and then reap the rewards.
