🚦 Rebrand With “Why”
🚨 When to Rebrand
📢 Overcommunicate a Rebrand
🚦 Rebrand With “Why”
“Why?” is the most important question to answer in any rebranding or renaming project.
If you can’t give a succinct, authentic and sharable reason why you are rebranding, stop. Don’t pass go. Don’t collect $200. You’ve got to get your story right before you do anything else.
It’s easy to get caught up in the creative work of rebranding. It’s fun creating a new identity. It’s fun coming up with ways to announce and share the new brand. It’s fun thinking about what the new brand could be. But all that is secondary.
Why did you decide to rebrand?
Any major change to the façade of a business creates uncertainty. The most effective way to dispel that uncertainty is to be frank and blunt about why you’re changing the brand.
As you build the story of why you are rebranding, consider:
- Why is the rebrand important for the company?
- Why do your staff, management and executives want to support the brand change?
- Why is it important for your customers?
- Why now?
These are the questions you’ll be answering both internally and externally when you roll out the new brand. And if you don’t overtly answer these questions, people will make their own assumptions.
One Stat to Watch
1 to 2 Colors
95% of the top 100 brands only use one or two colors in their logos. Simple branding helps improve consistency and recognition.
🚨 When to Rebrand
Rebranding — especially changing your company name — is drastic and should be only used in very specific circumstances:
Mergers & Acquisitions: This is the most common reason to rebrand. One plus one does not deserve a hyphenated name. A name change following a merger is a logical process with the integration (or absorption) of the brands.
Product Growth: There are several examples where the product brand outgrows the company brand. 37Signals changed its company name to Basecamp. Basecamp was its flagship product and what the business became known for.
Repositioning: When a company changes its business model, a rebrand signals that the business has reset and is serving a new market. Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta to signal the brand’s transition to the metaverse.
Geographic Expansion: Not all brand names translate well across languages and cultures. You may choose to rebrand in order to compete globally, or develop localized brands for each market you serve.
Co-Opted Meaning: Sometimes brand names get poisoned. Following the rise of the Islamist terrorist group, ISIS, several companies were stuck with a branding problem. Isis Pharmaceuticals changed its name to Ionis Pharmaceuticals. When a brand becomes a liability, it has to change.
📢 Overcommunicate a Rebrand
One of the biggest mistakes of rebranding is under communicating the change. Rebranding often takes a lot longer than companies expect.
If you make the bold choice to rebrand your business, transition the brand deliberately:
- Overcommunicate internally and externally.
- Clearly articulate the “why” behind the rebrand.
- Maintain links, especially in Google, to the old brand.
- Transition the rebrand slowly (9+ months).
You need to educate your customers on the new brand to help bring along as much of the history as possible to the new brand.
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