Dynamic Business

In today’s society, image is everything. Having a strong brand is crucial to your business’ success. So whether you’re looking at branding for the first time or about to embark on a rebrand, there’s a lot that needs to be considered.

In order to discuss rebranding we need to first define ‘brand’. Put simply, a brand is how a business differentiates itself from all other businesses, especially its competitors. The brand is its personality; and the way that personality is perceived may differ between stakeholders such as the general public, customers, staff, media and shareholders.

According to Wikipedia, a brand is “a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer”. More specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design and media commentary.

Branding is rising in importance in today’s increasingly cynical society, where each person receives thousands of messages per day that they they need to sift through in order to make decisions about their lifestyle needs and desires. If you want your brand to make a greater impression than the rest, and one that sticks, you need to carefully consider each aspect of your branding strategy and the target markets you must influence. Branding is not a finite process, it is a continual campaign. The moment you lose concentration is the moment all your branding plans begin to unravel.

How do you ascertain the way in which your stakeholders perceive your brand? Ask them! Whether it’s via simply talking to people or by using more formal methods such as customer surveys and shareholder audits, you will get a good idea about the aspects of your branding exercise that are successful and the aspects needing work.

When a business goes through a rebranding process it is changing its identity, its personality, and therefore the way it wants stakeholders to perceive it. This may involve significant changes to areas including logo, tagline, jingle and business name, along with its marketing and public relations strategies. Businesses usually rebrand themselves because the previous brand was not putting across the desired impression. Sometimes rebranding happens inadvertently due to stakeholder influence or corporate activity.

Considering rebranding?

1.   Ask why you are doing it. Are you planning to rebrand for necessity or to stroke your own or someone else’s ego? Is it really what your stakeholders need from your business? Examples of positive reasons include rebranding to reposition a company to take advantage of changing market conditions or because a business has stagnated and it is a way of kick-starting a brand.

2.   Review what you are saying about yourselves as a business. This needs to be reflective of the consumer experience: what franchisees offer is the ability to put consumers in a position to make clearer, well informed choices.

3.   Perform a comprehensive audit of all the factors that make up your brand. It is more than the collateral, more than the physical attributes, more than your logo, your colours and your posters, TV or outdoor ads. Wyatt describes a brand as ‘the movie that plays in someone’s head whenever your brand name is mentioned’.

4.   Include a review of your corporate culture. It is about creating perceptions and about what all your stakeholders feel are the promises you make to them.

5.   Be very clear about why you are doing it and what you are trying to achieve. Rebranding can often be a costly exercise and you do not want to unnecessarily spend time, money, resources and effort on a strategy that is not fully thought out. Work out the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats involved before going ahead.