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Rebranding — the organizational strategy to re-energize business growth — became fearless in 2019, with more companies willing to take the plunge and several among them pushing the boundaries of the traditional approach to rebranding execution.
Each year at this time, our team compiles observations on the year’s breakthrough moments in rebranding and assembles a few predictions on how the strategy will evolve in the year to come. There was a lot of rebranding discussion in 2019. We even saw President Trump suggest that troubled Boeing should rebrand its grounded 737 Max airplane model to help put news of disastrous crashes behind it. Luckily, the company realized that rebranding is not a quick-fix strategy to easily step away from your problems.
Here are several interesting trends we’ve seen this past year:
Fear Is Fading
Leaders are less fearful of changing up their brand proposition and company name than ever before, if demonstrated by nothing more than the daily Google Alerts we review on rebranding news announcements.
This means business leadership increasingly sees rebranding as a viable investment to clean up dated brands, present themselves as more modern, or to better position the company for growth with a new customer promise. They appear to be overcoming hesitations of the hard work necessary to change the organization’s brand, the risk of losing business or customers and concerns over the return on investment. Clearly, the business needs to rebrand are outweighing the fear, and activity is showing up across all industries and business sizes — from major consumer brands to privately-held organizations.
‘Rebranding’ Is Still Being Misrepresented
While we see growing popularity in the use of the term “rebranding” in news reports, it’s increasingly clear that any modification of a brand is being classified as a rebranding. In many cases, companies are simply refreshing their brand, updating a logo or tagline.
Our team sticks to the true definition of rebranding as redefining your brand promise — the heart and soul of your organization — including a full restatement of your customer promise, name, logo, visual presentation, customer and employee experience, etc. Perhaps it is more comfortable for leadership to embrace the concept of rebranding if the activity only includes a logo update or new graphic identity.
Brands Are Simplifying
In an effort to mimic the energy of a modern startup with short, one-word culture-friendly names (think: Lyft, TikTok or Hulu), an increasing number of established organizations are simplifying their names or dropping unnecessary descriptors to focus on the strongest brand element.
Dunkin’ Donuts formally launched its rebranding to simply Dunkin’ in January. Meanwhile, Bank of America announced it would drop the name Merrill Lynch “from its investment bank and trading operations and keep just ‘Merrill’ as the brand for its wealth management division.” BOA purchased Merrill Lynch over a decade ago, one of the most esteemed names in wealthy circles.
Companies have been careful, though, not to remove any meaning from their simplified names, like Weight Watchers did with its 2018 rebranding to lifestyle brand WW, which resulted in customer attrition early this year.
Brands Turn To Untraditional Approaches
With reduced fear in the investment to rebrand, companies are also redefining the process, even taking on a rebranding for strictly news value. Nothing tops IHOP’s 2018 publicity stunt rebranding to IHOb to introduce a new burger line, but we are seeing other companies also redefining the rebranding process in interesting ways.
Long-established lodging website Vacation Rental By Owner found its daring side by introducing a new pronunciation of its abbreviated VRBO name, which required TV advertising and video to convey.
And transparency is pushing some companies to not execute their rebranding work behind the scenes but in an out-in-the-open, engaging manner. Real estate giant Coldwell Banker took on what it described as “transparent” rebranding in the identification of a new brand promise and logo as the opportunity to engage its independent agents nationwide in selecting between different logo options.
With such exciting movement in the rebranding world this year, the obvious question is: What will we see in 2020?
Further Disruption Of The Rebranding Process
We believe marketers will break more boundaries to publicly engage stakeholders in the process and not just the rebranding outcome. Rebranding requires a new story to be successful, and companies will go beyond the usual to conceptualize and convey that story.
We’ll probably see more examples of crowdsourcing new brand name development, especially among younger companies who will utilize their online community in the process. This comes with risk — if you invite participation, you have to be prepared to accept what options are provided. Organizations will continue to find new clever techniques to implement a rebranding that will both mitigate blowback and create the opportunity for engagement and ownership of the change.
Shorter Still
Established companies will likely continue the effort to shorten their multi-word names to create that same instant, one-word appeal of startups. Too many meaningless and emotional brand names will adopt shorter, compounded brand names that support their growth strategies. On the new logo design front, companies are leaning toward more mobile app or tile-designed “badge” logos that shadow tech-friendly competitors.
Change Management Embraced
We see growing corporate acceptance that any external brand transformation demands significant internal alignment to ensure that the company can deliver on a consistent new brand proposition. Leaders will demand that the change management discipline is part of the team to ensure understanding and internal adoption of the new brand platform.
With that, we toast a new year and those courageous rebranders!
