How To Know If It’s Time To Rebrand – 15 Signs
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Your brand is your business’s most valuable asset. And like any other business asset, your brand needs a review from time to time. But how do you know when to change your business image?
Too often the red flags get lost in the hustle and bustle of work insanity. And even when you notice them, the decision to embark on a makeover initiative is seldom an easy one.
So how do you know when it’s finally time to pick up the phone and call a brand agency?
15 Signs Why You Should Consider Rebranding
To help you, we’ve put together a list of the top signs that it’s time to rebrand. In the following, we’ll take a look at each of these signs, what they mean, and how a new brand may approach them. We’ll also look at why rebranding is essential for your business to succeed and what are the first steps to take once you’ve decided to rebrand.
1. Your Brand Name No Longer Reflects Your Brand Vision
Sometimes changes in cultural context can alter the meaning of a brand name and it might not seem appropriate for the brand’s next iteration. What may have appeared like a huge name years ago may not really be relevant to your brand today.
If you think that your current brand does not reflect the vision of your business anymore, you might want to consider, not a total rebrand, but a few changes that will still keep you recognizable by your past customers/clients.
2. You’re Not Proud of Your Brand Preference
You picked your own color scheme without consulting specialists, only to discover that they were obsolete. After all, if you’re embarrassed by your brand, chances are other members of your organization are as well, which can take a big toll on external promotion and morale.
Being embarrassed about your brand doesn’t always indicate the need for a complete rebranding. Your brand’s visual and/or verbal identity may just need to be refreshed. Primarily a cosmetic solution, a brand refresh is a readjustment of the look and feel of your brand. A brand refresh may still have a strong influence on a stagnant or outdated brand if it keeps your business’s DNA or core market position intact.
3. You Failed to Differentiate Yourself from the Competition
Another way to know when to rebrand is to know when your brand starts to look like everyone else. Ultimately, It’s all about differentiating yourself from the competition when it comes to your branding strategy. However, you’d be amazed at how many businesses are unable to connect – or even identify – their main differentiators. When you don’t have clearly articulated differentiators, growing sales and business can be extremely difficult. It’s important that your employees and customers understand why your brand is superior to the competition.
A brand name may assist you in identifying and refining your key differentiators, such as your strategic edge: what you are doing better than anybody else. Your competitive advantage is the differentiator that sets your brand apart from all others. Ultimately, no competitive advantage is as powerful or enduring as a strong brand. A strong brand allows you to compete, whether or not you have a tangible advantage over your competition.
4. Your Brand Has Become Too Complicated or Diffused
Is your brand experience scattered or confusing? Does it sound like a tangle of offers without any unifying brand narrative? If so, maybe it’s time to rebrand your business.
Maintaining a brand across time is challenging, particularly for big businesses with numerous stakeholders with opposing interests. A lack of brand direction offers major difficulties to its efficacy, whether as a result of unrestrained expansion or just bad brand management.
Non-target businesses frequently diversify their product offers or simply mimic the competitors. They are distinguished by a general lack of relevance and weak or vague value propositions. The more complex your brand, the harder it is for customers to understand. If the complexity of your brand is causing your audience to lose sight of it, it’s probably time to take a step back to simplify and target. And a brand new is the only way to get that kind of perspective.
5. Your Business Model or Strategy Has Changed
Another sign of when to change your business image is a change in your business model or strategy. You can’t constantly foresee the outside factors that will drive you to modify your organization. But when your business model or strategy changes, your brand has to change too. How your business is viewed by those it serves should always align with how it operates behind the scenes.
When changing your brand to accommodate a fundamental change in your business, you need to start with the basics: your brand’s compass. Any complete rebranding begins with consolidating your business purpose, vision, mission, and values. Why does your business exist? Where is she heading? How will she do it? What are the values that define the culture of your company?
The clear formulation of these guiding principles is the starting point for any new branding, especially those inspired by a change in business strategy. Your brand’s compass forms a basis for the many other elements of your brand and sets the course for your brand’s future success.
6. You Have Exceeded Your Mark
Knowing when to change brands can be as easy as realizing you’ve passed your brand. Even if you manage your brand expertly as it evolves, there will come a time when you get past its initial iteration. It’s not a question of if, but when.
When you change brands to keep pace with growth, you don’t have to leave all of your old brands behind. If it’s likely that your brand has weaknesses, it’s just as likely that you want to continue to build on its strengths to move forward.
7. You Are in the Process of a Merger or Acquisition
A sure-fire sign that it’s time to rebrand is that you are in the process of making a merger or acquisition. Consolidations nearly usually necessitate some kind of rebranding. In each purchase, it’s critical to consider how the acquired brand fits into the purchasing entity’s brand architecture.
In the case of mergers, brand architecture is just as important. Ensuring optimal relationships between newly merged brands, products and services helps avoid redundancy, inconsistency, confusion, and cannibalization. Costly inefficiencies like this might detract from the overall value of a strategic alliance. A consistent marketing architecture is critical to any company’s success, but especially those involved in mergers and acquisitions. A rebranding strategy by carefully emphasizing the brand architecture is the best way to ensure the lasting success of all entities involved in the transaction.
8. You Have Moved or Developed beyond Your Original Geography
Another sign of when to change your business image is if you’ve moved or expanded beyond the city or state where your business started. Regional businesses often face the reality of rebranding when faced with expansion. If your brand name is related to where it was born, chances are a name change is needed as well.
But regardless of the brand, expansion into a new region will always bring new customers whose needs are as yet unknown. And the only way to understand new customer needs is to do customer research. As the foundation of a new brand, in-depth customer research allows you to identify the unique challenges of audiences in your new territory.
9. You Need to Dissociate Your Brand from Negative Perceptions
Another sign of when to rebrand is that you need to dissociate your brand from a negative image. These days, it doesn’t take much for a word or concept to take on a devastating negative connotation. Thanks to social media, political and business missteps can spread like wildfire, turning a once harmless brand into a real hot potato.
Rebranding is often the easiest and most effective remedy in these situations, starting with an internal brand audit to assess where and to what extent associations are managed. A thorough examination of your company’s numerous touchpoints will reveal crucial information about the sources of unfavorable opinions. Negative associations aren’t always as dire as those faced by Philip Morris – who renamed his brand Altria to counter the deep negative associations with smoking – but they can be difficult for a business to disentangle nonetheless. Rebranding is often the only viable way forward.
10. You Struggle to Increase Your Prices
A telltale sign of when to change brands is the fact that you are struggling to raise your prices. If the market price of your product or service seems hopelessly fixed, despite the rising cost of materials, rebranding can be an effective way out. Because, at the end of the day, brands are all about how customers perceive them. in the minds of the people you serve, the cost of your products is entrenched. Rebranding offers you the ability to reinterpret the value people place on your items and raise your prices in response.
Strong brands use their price power to dominate their markets, revive lagging assets, and defend themselves against competitive threats. Like few other market characteristics, pricing power is a growth driver.
11. You Are Trying to Get in Touch with a Target Market
If you’re trying to capture the attention of an audience that has just become profitable, it’s probably time to give your business a facelift. The first step in retaining new customer segments is to make sure that your brand meets their needs. Brand repositioning allows you to integrate brand tracking into your brand revitalization efforts.
With brand monitoring, you can keep track of new and existing consumers’ motivations, preferences, requirements, and purchasing behaviors, and modify your brand experience appropriately. After all, it is good for businesses to stay tuned to changing demographics. The last thing a savvy young population wants is to associate with the dubious brands of their parent’s generation. A new brand allows you to redefine yourself to reach these new untapped audiences.
12. You Don’t Attract the Best Talent
The final sign of when to change your business image is that you are failing to attract the best talent. After all, the best talent wants to work for the best brands. If you are having trouble recruiting top candidates to grow your business, it may be because your employer’s brand is not up to the task. A new brand allows you to redefine your brand for your customers and your current and future employees.
In a competitive employment market, a great employer brand will entice the most talented and competent employees. It will allow you to make sure that you are interviewing candidates who match your values and who are ready to deliver on your brand promise. A new brand image focused on your employer brand is one way to start attracting candidates who will become enthusiastic employees who will positively contribute to the culture of the company and foster trust between colleagues and clients.
13. You Sell Less or Have Lost Customers
An outdated image doesn’t appeal, plain and simple. So your image may be out of date and, as much as your products are good and the price competitive if your brand seems “old-fashioned” people perceive your products or services as stagnant in the past. Visual and graphic codes evolve with us. Your brand image has a limited lifetime. That’s why all the big ones adapt every X years.
Who trusts a company that doesn’t take care of something as basic as, for example, its logo? The logo is very important because it is the main element that the customer identifies with the brand. In other words, the potential customer many times all they see of a brand is its logo.
14. It Is Time to Change Your Brand If You Want to Get Rid of an Old Image That Is Detrimental to Your Business
You will understand this with an example. For many years, the Burberry brand was not as well regarded as it is now in England. In fact, the people who used this brand associated themselves with the typical thug and problem gangs. Thanks to this negative association that the brand had, Burberry lost many potential customers. And he needed to do something to change the situation: completely change his brand.
Therefore, Burberry bet everything to position itself as a high-end clothing brand. And for this, he did not hesitate to be seen among celebrities like Emma Watson in his advertising pieces. Do you know what is the most surprising? Burberry did not change its appearance, nor its prices. Instead, the brand focused all its efforts on cutting-edge art and fashion in its new presentation.
So think about it. You may not be in as drastic a situation as Burberry, but you may be attracting a different customer base than you had planned. This is a sign that you need changes.
15. Discuss Ownership of Any Copyrights in Creative Results as Part of Your Rebranding
Finally, there is the question of creative property. When hiring an independent artist, design firm, or graphic designer, make sure you obtain the right to utilize the intellectual property exclusively.
While the laws vary significantly from one country to the next. You’ll likely want to start a “job for hire” business arrangement. Talk to your lawyer and brand advisor about the best way to move forward. Although you don’t wind up owning the creative, it’s a good start. You can pay to block its exclusive use. Alternatively, you can create visual content using free tools without worrying about copyright issues. It’s going to be so much easier to use tools that will aid you to create and design original images for your brand or company.
Ready to Rebrand?
The decision to change your company’s corporate image can have a great effect on your current customer base. New companies making their leap don’t have much of a history to lean on, but for an established company with a large following, changing a key element of your brand can have a huge impact on your core audience.
Therefore, it is important to consider how your past and current consumers will react to such a change, be it your logo or name design. A failure at such a stage can lead to a reduction in your brand recognition and trust among the people who know you and love your company.
One of the challenges of the corporate makeover is maintaining value. This can leave consumers feeling that their loyalty has been trampled on. Whether you’re already on your way to changing your corporate image or planning the stages, you need to have a solid marketing strategy to handle this challenge. We hope that our 15 tips and signs have helped you to decide whether it’s time to rebrand or not. All the best!