“We need a new brand.”
How often have you heard this refrain? Gone are the days when businesses chiseled their brands in stone and never deviated an iota. The world is moving too fast for companies to stay locked into an identity. I know. I have been involved in a few major rebrands throughout my career managing professional services firms. I understand the pain and effort required in a rebrand. I know that there is a world of difference between a rebrand and tweaking your corporate message or rolling out a new logo. Allow me to share a few lessons learned for those of you who find yourselves working on a corporate rebrand.
Why Rebrands Happen: The ‘Good’ Reasons
I think it’s instructive to understand why businesses rebrand, and why the topic is arising more frequently these days. There are legitimate reasons to rebrand, and there are not-so-good reasons. Legitimate reasons include when your company:
• Undergoes a merger/acquisition.
• Launches a new product or service that targets a radically different client base than the one you’ve been servicing.
• Makes a major international expansion into new markets you’ve never played in.
• Needs to adapt your reputation to changing values and preferences of your customers, employees and shareholders.
All the above are happening with breathtaking frequency now. Look at mergers and acquisitions: In the 2010s, there were a staggering 464,439 M&A transactions, up 26% from the previous decade. Each M&A transaction could create a legitimate reason for a rebrand. That’s the nature of the digital world we live in now.
Why Rebrands Happen: The ‘Bad’ Reasons
Not-so-good reasons include:
• Your CEO just read an article about a hot new business trend and thinks you need a new identity. You need to be open to new ideas, but don’t be led around the nose by an article that goes viral.
• Your business experiences a crisis. A crisis requires its own focused attention. You first need to assess the long-term impact before considering how the fallout affects the core of your brand.
• You lose a client deal. Losing business hurts and might be a sign of a larger problem, but first you need to find out why you lost the business. The issue may have nothing to do with your brand.
Now, are you sure you need a new brand? If you do, then before you dive into this undertaking, take a deep breath, and bear in mind these lessons I have learned in my own life. These are real, from-the-heart takeaways that I learned especially after undertaking two momentous rebrands. The first occurred when I sold agency iCrossing to Hearst in 2010, and we saw an opportunity to reintroduce iCrossing as a new kind of full-service agency that had expanded beyond its roots in paid search. The second occurred just about a year ago, after Investis Digital (then known as Investis) completed a number of mergers, expanded globally and sought a new identity. Here’s what I learned:
• A rebrand means more than changing your logo or your name. Rebranding means examining your brand foundation: your company’s purpose (why you exist), values (the core beliefs and behaviors that drive your actions) and story. For many businesses, a new brand means a new story. But that’s not all.
• Be ready for a slog. A rebrand means long hours, days, weeks and possibly months getting to know your business all over again, talking to your people, your clients and your shareholders. Doing in-depth research. Having emotional debates over the research. And then figuring out a way forward.
• Be forward-thinking. A new brand needs to reflect where your business is going, not just where it is today. A new brand needs to be aspirational in the sense that it challenges you to get better in order to live up to the way you define yourself on your best day. For this reason, be careful when you get feedback from your people, clients and shareholders about where your brand is headed. They can all ground your ideas in present-day reality. But they may not be able to envision the company you are defining for tomorrow.
• Accept dissent. If you try to make everyone happy, you’re going to end up with a confusing and listless brand built on compromise and consensus, like one of those corporate mission statements that consist of 20 sentences. You can just tell when a brand has been created by committee with everyone’s best interests at heart. You end up with a brand that confuses everyone. And guess what: you’ll still make someone unhappy. Deal with it. The decision you make will upset someone. But in time, they’ll get over it.
• Get outside help. Think of brand development as corporate therapy: You need an outside perspective to help you work your way through the change. That’s because outsiders who specialize in rebrands know the terrain. They also have license to tell you when your approach stinks, and an internal team isn’t always comfortable doing that. During our most recent rebrand, we enlisted the help of an expert, Fran Biderman-Gross. She helped us uncover our blind spots and imposed a workable process that led up to changing our name to Investis Digital. We formed such a close partnership with her that Fran and I co-wrote a book How to Lead a Values-Based Professional Services Firm, in which we discuss how to run a firm based on the brand foundation cited above.
Now, in everything I wrote above, I mentioned “logo” and “message” very sparingly. I did so for a reason: to underscore the reality that visual and written identity are just manifestations of your brand — important manifestations, but not the core of your brand. The soul of your brand comes from the foundation I mentioned: purpose, values and story. Get those elements right first, and the tactical elements of your brand will be true to your company.