Rebranding And Why Your Company Needs It

Rebranding is one of the most crucial branding strategies that can either elevate or downgrade the progress of an enterprise. The blog offers a brief on this marketing strategy and how it impacts your organization. It highlights the following key topics:

• Rebranding
• Rebranding success and failure stories
• Rebranding strategies

Rebranding is a risky investment, having the power to create confusion, and chaos is not done right. However, when done right, it can elevate your brand reach than before. Let us get a brief on this vital marketing strategy.

Rebranding

Rebranding is a marketing strategy to give an established brand new identity. During this process, a new name, term, symbol, design, or concept is created to align the branding with newly identified values while maintaining the core personality of the brand. The purpose is to display a distinct brand identity than before for the consumers and shareholders. The elements that come under the sword of change include logo design, brand name, marketing strategy, typography, shade, and advertising.

Top Benefits of Rebranding?

1. Communicate with a new and appropriate audience

The renewed appearance of your brand has the power to attract a new audience that resonates with your attributes. When done right, rebranding attracts the audience and compels them to take notice of your newly formed branding designs. This newly found connection with the audience contributes to the success of the brand altogether.

2. A fresh start

Renewed branding caters to a new life in your brand. Your current branding may be obsolete and wouldn’t adhere to the new trends of the market. You have a better opportunity to target new goals and achieve them with renewed efforts.

3. Increase in Brand awareness

A new identity attracts more engagement. The industry and the public begin the discussion on the newly created identity and how it satisfies or dissatisfies their expectations. A word of mouth generates more engagement especially in these times of enhanced digital marketing opportunities.

Key cons of Rebranding

1. Confusion might off-putting

The public is not always ready for a change. As much as you can expect the audience to understand your rebranding concept, you should be ready for the worst. Loyal customers associate deeply with your brand identity and a wrong change can cause panic among your audience.

2. Cost

Rebranding involves a renewed branding strategy, new content, new graphic design, and renewed logo. Enterprises surpass tremendous expenses while coping with new branding requirements. The cost might hurt more when the rebranding is not done right. This risky element should be handled with care by marketing experts.

Success stories of rebranding

CVS Pharmacy

CVS became the first chain of pharmacy to eliminate tobacco products. These products accounted for 4% of their sales. However, to cater to the health of the public they decided to stop the sale of tobacco products. The change in their name ended up making a huge profitable contribution to the enterprise as compared to their previous marketing strategies. Changing their name to align with their core beliefs and backing it up by effective action resulted in gaining appreciation from the audience in the form of more sales.

Changes:

• Name change from CVS Caremark to CVS Health
• Stopped selling tobacco products

Lesson for you:

• Don’t shy away from taking bold decisions if you have a genuine idea to back it up with.
• Real value is always appreciated by the public. Decisions implementing a positive impact on health will always nourish your enterprise.

Burberry:

Burberry originally focused on the development of outdoor attire but later moved on to the high fashion market. Its main fashion house has its focus on trench coats, ready-to-wear outerwear, fragrances, fashion accessories, and cosmetics.

The brand however lost its magic of garnering A-listers and became a uniform for the so-called Chav culture. This new attraction sent the Burberry sales and name plummeting at a rapid speed. At one point it became associated with people who were anti-social and thugs. The one upon a time fashion icon now became a laughing stock of its own success.

Expensive clothing has always been an attraction for thugs. Burberry had to change the stance people had on the brand and bring back the A-listers in the game. With the rebranding, they wanted to showcase as a fashion-forward and glamorous brand that exemplifies contemporary Britain.

Changes:

• Creative strategies that align with current trends and demands while maintaining the core values.
• Investment in digital space when the rest of the competition thought it was unnecessary
• Heavy marketing of the renewed story

What You Can Learn from Them:

• Learn to adjust to modern trends
• Keep experimenting with strategies to serve your purpose effectively
• Confidence to keep going and inventing

Airbnb

Airbnb – Air-bed and breakfast, is an online marketplace that offers arrangements for lodging, primary homestays, or tourism experience. It connects people who want to rent their homes to the people in search of accommodation. The company grew rapidly for 3 years after its inception in 2008. However, an incident in 2011 led to a fall in the trust of the brand. The house of a host was vandalized and Airbnb refused any compensation stating that the company is not responsible for the losses.

The rapid spread of the news attracted much hatred from the public. Airbnb finally decided to insure the hostess and now offers a $1 million guarantee to hosts.

Changes

• Logo and color changed to display a homely approach. The Belo symbol represents people, places, and love forming into an A shape. The red shade signifies love and passion.
• Approach towards insuring host

What You Can Learn from Them:

• Confidence to amend mistakes and make appropriate changes

Failure stories

GAP – The logo debacle

GAP Inc. is the largest clothing and accessory retailer in the United States of America. Founded in 1969, GAP’s only merchandise consisted of Levi and LP records to attract teen customers. GAP Inc. originally owned a service trademark to its name. In 2020, GAP launched a new logo design and replaced the one that had served the enterprise for more than 20 years.

The new logo was not highly appreciated by the public and displayed a major dislike for the same. GAP, however, analyzing the situation went ahead with a branding turnaround and switched back to the original logo within a week. The rebranding was estimated to cost them $100 million.

Kraft Foods

Kraft Foods is an American grocery manufacturing and processing enterprise in Chicago. Kraft Foods redesigned their brand identity in 2009, introducing a new logo. The new logo was long, had a tagline, and experienced some new colors as compared to the previous one. However, the new brand logo was highly disliked by the public and the branding fraternity compelling Kraft Foods to move back to the previous logo within six months of launching the new logo.

However, after five months Kraft shifted to a similar logo with the tagline, ditching the original one with blue ink and white background. The rebranding didn’t work either and it had to shift back to the original. Such a branding blunder from a conglomerate is also possible. Rebranding is a risky avenue, you don’t know how your audience might react.

Rebranding strategies

To move forward with Rebranding, you need to decide whether your brand requires partial or complete rebranding. Identify the elements that necessitate the change and how to incorporate new values while maintaining the core identity.

● Partial Rebrand

The partial rebrand includes minor changes to the brand identity that do not compromise on the core elements of the brand. For a well-established business, a partial rebrand can assist to maintain the brand loyalty, while refreshing the brand image with current trends to stay in the competition.

● Total Rebrand

The total rebrand involves in-depth revision of the brand identity as compared to the partial. Businesses adapt to a total rebrand when the original identity is no longer in alignment with the renewed brand values. Companies can bring changes like a new brand name, new logo, new mission, and a new demographic and target audience. Mergers and Acquisitions often lead to complete rebranding.

Rebranding is a marketing strategy that works best when the time and occasion adheres to the requirement of utilizing the strategy. Constant changes after rebranding can often create a perception of lack of decisiveness on part of the enterprise which negatively impacts the engagement altogether. Here’s our guide to help you with the basic understanding of Rebranding. Do check our other blogs on yosantpatel.com