Whether you’re running a small business or an established enterprise, you should know the value of a strong brand. This goes beyond your brand name and logo, of course. Your brand image is like a collection of all the thoughts customers have about your business, and it’s affected by all of your company’s actions—not just the way you advertise. Also called brand equity, this is the value that people associate with your brand itself and not your individual products or services, and it’s best to think about this before something goes wrong.
Rebranding is a marketing strategy that creates a new brand identity, often in an attempt to better connect with their target audience and build better brand equity. Brand identity includes every aspect of your visual identity, and rebranding can mean a new logo, new name, new tag line, or even a new target market. Good reasons to rebrand include modernizing your company, further differentiating from the competition, or even moving away from a bad reputation. Just make sure to plan your strategy carefully to avoid the top rebranding mistakes.
Re-evaluate Your Company Mission
Before you start a partial or total rebrand, you need to be certain that your new ideas align with your goals for your business. This will help you determine exactly what needs to change and how you can better tap into your market. What does your business do, how do you do it, and why are you doing it? Your answers to these questions can change as your company evolves, and it’s important that everything your business does keeps in line with your answers.
Incorporate people from all departments of your business when you’re discussing your new mission to ensure the efforts of all team members are contributing to building your new brand. Having a clear picture of why and how your brand is changing will make it easier to communicate the changes to your audience.
Study Your Competitors
Regularly performing a competitive analysis is a good idea for any business to see how they’re stacking up in the market, but it’s especially crucial when rebranding. As your business goals change, you may find that you’re becoming interested in target demographics you hadn’t considered before. This means you’ll have more competitors, and you’ll need to see how you can differentiate from them in addition to your usual competitors.
You can use search engines and trade publications to find out things like how many products your competitors sell, who their main customers are, how they advertise, how they use influencers on social media, and much more. This is a perfect opportunity to see how your business can reach any gaps in the market your competitors may have left as well as improve on their strategies that are working well.
Find a Balance Between the Old and New
Rebranding is naturally a stressful time for you and your employees, but it can also be confusing for your customers. If you’re doing a major change with a new logo, tag line, or especially a new name, it’s still good to keep some elements similar to your previous brand. If your products had unique packaging, or if your advertisements used a recognizable style of language, for example, you might maintain these elements to avoid alienating existing customers. You probably aren’t looking to start completely from scratch, after all. If you need help with branding ideas, you might want to speak with the Jason Wong agency.
Marketing experts can also help you with choosing new fonts, color schemes, and updated logos to best communicate your new brand. If you haven’t had a big online presence beforehand, your rebranding mission is the perfect time to update your web design and become more active as well. Running an e-commerce store in addition to your physical storefronts can open your business to a whole world of new potential customers.
