There comes a time in your professional life when your business stagnates. You’ve tweaked your products and services here and there, but remain unsatisfied. You feel directionless, unfulfilled, or even exhausted.
When you reach this point, it’s time for a serious change. A rebranding could be ahead.
Seventy-four percent of S&P 100 companies rebranded within their first seven years. Beyond this, most businesses maintain a cycle, weighing the costs and benefits of a refresh every seven to ten years.
For me, this point came at year four. And let me tell you, it’s a lot harder than it seems. Here are a few fundamentals I think will help you (and me) through this stage of professional development.
What is a “brand,” actually?
Kostiantyn Krutikov defined in a Master’s thesis that a “brand is not a thing, product, company, or organization… A brand is best described as the sum of a person’s entire experience, the perception of a thing, product, company or organization.”
It’s not something material, but a concept that exists in people’s minds. It’s an intellectual part of your business that underscores the service and value you offer.
Your brand isn’t your main product, your color scheme, or your logo. Instead, it’s only represented in those things. They’re expressions of your business identity.
That’s why Old Spice was able to rejuvenate its sales and relevance by simply updating its identity for younger generations.
Without changing the core product, or even the logo, Old Spice hiked up its sales by 11% in just one year after debuting commercials with Isaiah Mustafa that coined one of the OG viral meme phrases, “I’m on a horse.”
They went from a tired brand that was associated with “grandfather’s deodorant” to a well-established company and product line that is now distinguished by humor and youthful energy.
Your personal brand lies at the heart of your operations. It’s what drives your product development, as well as target audience communication and outreach. In Krutikov’s words, it’s the source of your goods and services.
And when that identity gets stale, or in some way soured, it’s time to consider a transformation.
Related:
What is rebranding?
There are lots of different interpretations as to what the process of rebranding actually entails. According to Chai-Lee Goi and Mei-Teh Goi, some say that rebranding is “repositioning or revitalising the brand.”
Others say it’s a partial or total change in the tangible and intangible elements of a brand, such as products or value, respectively. It can be a series of actions that take place over a finite period of time.
Rebranding can also be ongoing. For some, it’s best described as a process that requires the brand identity and image to adapt to a changing environment.
In some cases, rebranding can spark with something as simple as changing the company’s name. Such an action seems like a small gesture, but it could reflect a deeper shift or growth within the business.
Naturally, this would lead to the adjustment of the business operations and perhaps its interaction with the target audience.
That said, rebranding doesn’t have to be an exclusively internal process. In fact, your customers can play just as active a role as you or your employees and partners.
Since marketing is a two-way street, both internal and external stakeholders, or those with an interest in the business, are equally important. Knowing how you want to portray your business and how that’s received is critical to perfecting the business’s full identity.
No matter how you slice it, rebranding is completely separate from repositioning and restyling. A comparison of the three might look something like this:
| What does your business need? | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Changes in products and services? | Changes in imagery, symbology? | Changes in customer vision, direction? | Changes in customer communication, perception? | |
| Repositioning | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Restyling | ✔ | ✔ | ||
| Rebranding | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
In short, rebranding includes repositioning and restyling. It’s a process that affects every level of your business. Top-to-bottom updates like this come with a sizable risk.
Building a new brand for the wrong reasons could cost you dearly.
Misjudging your target audience’s pain points could snowball into misguided product development. Before you know it, thousands of dollars are down the drain.
That’s why it’s best to take as much time as you need to decide if a rebrand is right for you.
To change or not to change?
Knowing your motivations for rebranding is just as important as knowing your strategy. Jumping into a rebrand without any forethought could harm your business in the long-term. Here are a few things to consider before you journey down this path.
Bad reasons to rebrand
Rebranding shouldn’t be taken lightly. It demands lots of thought and planning.
That’s why Jon Simpson warns against rebranding on a whim. In particular, you should never initiate a rebrand if you’re trying to:
- Get out of a lull in sales
- Revamp marketing efforts
- Improve low brand awareness
This will only amount to a superficial fix that pulls resources away from addressing real issues impeding your business performance.
Plus, a hasty rebranding process can directly harm your business’s standing. A poorly-thought-out approach to redefining your company’s identity could damage the brand value and customer trust you’ve built up in the preceding years.
Productive reasons to revitalize your brand
You’ll know it’s time for a rebranding when there are significant, visible shifts in your business’s direction. There could be a change in your professional vision and purpose, for example. This would inevitably alter your messaging, and possibly products or services.
Goi and Goi offer a few specific examples of sound motivations to rebrand:
Keep up with the Joneses. Markets change. Customer needs are ever-evolving, and your business has to keep up with that. If your brand is nearing obsolescence like Blockbuster when Netflix burst onto the scene, it may be time for an upgrade.
Fierce competition. Being an entrepreneur can sometimes feel like you’re in a perpetual “arms race” against your competitors. If they’re gaining a serious edge over you, rebranding might be one way to distinguish yourself from them and claw back some ground in the market.
Merger or consolidation. Restructuring could come about due to profitability issues, target audience refinement, or changes in the vision or mission of the business. Whether you’re expanding or consolidating, such a dramatic change in the scope of your business could call for a total overhaul of the company’s identity.
Depending on the context and motivations, one rebranding strategy might be better than another. First, you’ll need to decide what type of rebranding you’re going to do.
Types of rebranding
Not all rebranding processes will look the same. The strategy will change depending on your needs and motivations. Still, Simpson offers two frameworks for guiding the general process:
- Partial rebranding: A simple refresh of services or identity, or a reconsideration of the marketplace in which the business operates. This is for the businesses that have a well-established identity and aren’t seeking a total overhaul.
- Total rebranding: Reimagining an entirely new goal, messaging, and visual identity. This is for businesses that are experiencing major restructuring and revising their mission, vision, and values.
This example model by Goi and Goi offers a starting point to help you decide if you need a partial or total rebrand.
If your concerns lie mostly in the external realm, then you’re likely in for a partial rebranding.
For instance, imagine that you’ve offered the same five core product types for years. Your marketplace hasn’t changed, your methods are the same.
After a while, your repeat clients are going to become less impressed with your work. It’ll become “same old, same old.” They’ll seek innovation and move on to your competitors.
What do you do to keep their attention? For one, you could expand your shop to a new marketplace. If you’re selling on Etsy, branch out to Amazon, or another platform that’s reasonable for you.
Introduce a newer, updated version of an existing product, or discover another segment of your target audience to cater to. All of this will push you to a more well-defined brand identity.
On the other hand, you might simply know deep down that it’s time for a major change. And that’s alright too! All that matters is that rebranding your business is aimed at improving the quality of life for you and your customers.
In either case, these steps can act as general guidelines within this model to help make your rebranding a reality.
Steps for rebranding
The steps you’ll take for rebranding are highly context-dependent and specific to you. I offer my experience as an example, not a prescription. But before we start, here are a few warnings I wish I’d wish I’d taken heed of before I entered this chapter in my freelancing career.
First, be prepared for rebranding to take a lot longer than you expect.
I thought all I needed was a cosmetic refresh of my website and a few tweaks to my available services.
But the more I thought about why I was making these changes, and the more questions I asked about what had changed in me as the service provider, I realized there was a much bigger transformation ahead.
Plus, it’s not cheap.
Your business can’t go fully dormant while you reform the brand. For example, the changes to my product offerings require upgrades to my office equipment and software. The money for those upgrades is not going to earn itself!
No matter what, stay active.
This doesn’t mean you have to keep marketing at 100%. It does mean that you have to maintain key relationships. Don’t ruin the reputation you already have on the way to building a new or revitalized one. Bad word of mouth can compromise your rebrand before it even gets off the ground.
And for goodness sake, don’t let your website and social media go completely silent, if you can help it. Having made this mistake, I can tell you it’s quite a challenge to build up a strong online presence a second time. Now let’s get started.
1. Assess the need
Figure out what it is you’re missing. Why do you feel the need to rebrand?
This is where you need to be honest with yourself. Don’t sugarcoat it.
Personally, I was increasingly dissatisfied with the direction and scope of my business.
I was niching down my interests, but my products and services were not keeping up. Plus, my standard operations were getting tougher to maintain. It was time for a change, or I was headed for burnout or failure.
All this considered, I would consider my process a total rebranding. In addition to changing my vision and goals, I’m further refining my target audience, and wholly revising my service and product offerings.
So, my step 1 ultimately brought me to these actions:
- Invest in professional development. Always strive to improve your craft. Find where your strengths and weaknesses lie to determine what needs sharpening and what’s worth letting go.
- Assess past trends to identify finer niches. Parts of my work simply weren’t satisfying anymore. I found that the quality of my services was significantly higher in certain niches, so I trimmed down my market focus to play to my strengths.
- Refine your target audience. Adjusting your service offerings will inevitably change your target audience. Don’t be afraid to modify your criteria of what makes an ideal prospect—more targeted marketing will help you avoid overexertion and a loss of focus.
2. Implement multi-level changes
Rebranding is a holistic process. Every part of your business will be transformed. The extent of that transformation is up to you.
Katharine Paljug suggests that rebranding can involve a redesign of various marketing materials. This could include your logo, email templates, brand colors, website, and business cards. But it can get much deeper than that.
Like me, you might need to adjust the entire mission and vision of your business. If your scope and direction have changed so dramatically that it requires a reconsideration of your target audience, then you’re in for a change in positioning and messaging.
| Current Audience | Current Goal | Current Services |
|---|---|---|
| Small- to medium-sized businesses, startups with environmental focus. | Offer science-based content writing to help position businesses as authorities in their respective spaces. Accurately inform customers and prospects on the business’s products or service offerings. | Content writing for websites, newsletters, social media. |
| New Audience | New Goal | New Services |
| Non-profits, startups, aspiring science communicators in conservation, environmental science, and environmental justice. | Provide the tools and support skills development for accessible science-based communication for public benefit and community empowerment. | How-to science communication video courses. Fundamental content creation package. |
This isn’t something to go about all willy-nilly. Seriously consider how your existing audience might respond. It’s not wise to just drop the clients or customers you currently work with.
In fact, you shouldn’t have to cut off existing customers at all, even if it’s a total rebrand.
Professionals with a positive reputation should be able to build on that and revitalize their present identity—not totally replace it.
Instead of pushing your current customers to take their business elsewhere, you should anticipate their concerns as they go on this journey with you.
Still, don’t announce your rebranding prematurely. Depending on your professional context and end goal, it could be better to have your strategy in motion before discussing the impending shift publicly.
When your rebrand is as extensive as mine—vision, product and service offerings, audience, marketing, and imagery—you’ll need to have your ducks in a row before you go public.
(Note: This step takes a deceptively long time! Set aside six months to a year, minimum. Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on if you’re working with a team or flying solo.)
3. Go public
This is the easiest part. But don’t be fooled. All your major marketing communications need to be drafted and ready to publish in advance.
Never shoot from the hip when it comes to marketing. It leads to over-promising, contradictions, and disappointment. (Speaking from experience.)
Your key goal is to inform your clients and broader target audience that there is a major change on the horizon. Get excited about it! This is a change that will ultimately serve your business and your customers.
Note that you might need to make use of old and new marketing channels simultaneously. At this point, if you’ve modified your target audience, you’ve likely discovered that the various segments are active on different platforms.
And if you’ve been lucky, you’ve probably already formed working relationships with new clients. This would help to build up a positive reputation in your new niche, even if it’s only a little at a time.
Whether you’re talking to existing or new clients, your priority is to make it clear why you rebranded.
Be open with your audience. Rebranding without warning or communication could risk confusion, or worse, the loss of public trust. On the contrary, an honest entrepreneur cultivates goodwill, and thus, good business.
Refresh your brand, refresh your business
Change is an inevitable part of professional growth. Don’t shrink from it; embrace it!
I get it: Undergoing extensive rebranding can make you feel a bit insecure. Looking back at your original brand, you might see flaws you’d never noticed before. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
Rebranding is an opportunity to identify where your business has gone right, and where it can get better.
Where there are drawbacks, address them. Where there are strengths, highlight them.
In the end, your goal is to improve your business’s ability to serve your customers and community in a way that is true to you, your values, and your priorities.
Give yourself time to develop and execute a rebranding strategy which will do just that.
