3 Steps to Rebrand and Transform your Business Successfully

Your brand is probably one of the most important assets in your business. A strong brand relates with your targeted audience and forms emotional connections. A business with non-existent branding is just another product or service on the market.

While business owners are looking to rebrand especially during the pandemic, it seems what most of them really want is just a change of logo or a new website design.

Will graphic design alone be sufficient to transform the overall branding of your business?

What is a Brand?

A brand is more than just a logo, web design or tagline.

“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.” ~ Elon Musk

It is a consistent delivery of an experience.

Through experience, it creates lasting memorable impressions.

Through impressions, it forms emotional bonds between consumer and the business.

Logos, web designs and taglines may represents the brand. However, while they are communication tools used to convey experiences to the masses, they are not the brand itself. Without experiences, it is difficult to form emotional bonds with cold hard tools.

To rebrand, businesses have to break and mould new brand personality to deliver new experiences. Without further ado, here are three steps you can consider to rebrand your business.

How to Rebrand your Business

1. Looking Through the Eyes of Consumers
2. Designing Desired Consumer Experience
3. Molding a New Brand Personality

1. Looking Through the Eyes of Consumers

Rebranding is a bottom top approach.

Instead of having a design-first approach, customer experience should be the foundation how we develop our rebranding strategy. Since your brand is the way your customer perceives you, we need to first establish who we are as a brand from the eyes of a consumer. Running a focus group or an online survey with your existing group of customers is a great way to provide an accurate, unbiased insight.

“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” ~ Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks

Here are a few questions that may help you to kickstart the discussion.

• What is the one word you would use to describe the brand?
• What is the appeal that entices you to choose the brand compared to other brands?
• Name an emotion that you would associate with the brand.
• In what ways do you feel the brand can be improved on in order to build a deeper connection with its customers?

By leveraging customers insights, we can get direct brand feedback from the very people who use our products and services.

2. Designing Desired Consumer Experience

Since we are now aware of our current customer experience from the ground, we need to conceptualize the type of consumer experience we wish to deliver.

In short, what do we want our future customers to feel about our brand.

“Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealized, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no character, and no public trust.” ~ Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group

Aside from the marketing team, it is critical to have representatives from different departments during conceptualization process such as sales, operations and customer service. Afterall, your conceptualized experience needs to permeate the entire organization. When everyone in the organization is on the same page, it is much easier for everyone to work together and deliver a consistent brand experience among the consumer base.

The same set of questions used in the previous focus discussion may also be used during the conceptualization process.

3. Molding a New Brand Personality

A new brand personality helps to facilitate new consumer experiences.

The hardest thing to get right when connecting with consumers is authenticity. Brands often try too hard in telling consumers what they want to be rather than being true about who they are as a brand. When an brand embraces its personality genuinely throughout the entire organisation, it is what that really resonate with consumers.

“Authencity and Storytelling is What that Make Brands Resonate.”

Like any personas, personality comes with attributes.

Attributes can help the organisation to embrace the brand personality top-down easily. You can be fun, candid, witty with a dark sense of humour. You can be warm, hearty, empathetic and dependable (a little boring). It depends on what kind of experiences you wish to deliver to your consumers.

Only then when you create a new logo, tagline or a website design, it helps to support the new brand experience as you will be applying your brand personality to these elements. Mostly importantly, they have to consistent and easy to recognize, so they can help people feel more at ease in recognising and embracing the new personality.

What is Your Favorite Rebranding Story?

If we have to choose, Harley-Davidson has to be our favorite rebranding story.

Back in 1985, the Harley-Davidson motorcycle was at risk of disappearing from highways when it almost went bankrupt. By creating an identity focused on the ideals of freedom, heritage, community, and quality, Harley Davidson created a loyal following of cult-like customers who understand exactly what the brand stands for, and the lifestyle experience they’re trying to sell. Most importantly, Harley-Davidson goes beyond the needs of the product and forms emotional bonds with its customers.

What is your favorite rebranding story? Share with us in the comment section below.