Your company’s branding is the most valuable and forward-facing asset that sets your business apart from your competitors. Think of branding as the cover of your company’s book. They say to never judge a book by its cover, but this doesn’t usually apply to branding as many judge a company based on the logo, messaging, mission, and other outward representations through social media channels, website, and the like.
Rebranding can sometimes feel like you’re taking a step away from the original intentions of your brand, your business, and how your company is represented to the world. It’s important to remember that rebranding actually brings your brand closer to the core values of your business while creating a stronger representation that better speaks to what you do, how you do it, and most importantly, who you do it for (namely, your customers).
Tackling a rebrand is not something you want to do if it isn’t necessary. From our experience, rebranding is a big and beautiful beast. We have rebranded and switched things up over the years and have created a strong brand that we are proud of. Through the rebranding process, we created a brand that serves our mission and values and ultimately speaks to how we serve our clients. Take a look at our rebranding process and the considerations we made when working through our rebrand.
To help you gauge if it’s time for a rebrand, we’ve put together a list of 5 top signs it might be time to reconsider your current branding. We’ll take a deep dive into rebranding and how it ultimately serves the success of your company, as well as steps to getting the rebranding process started should you decide it’s time to refresh your company’s most valuable and forward-facing representation - your brand.
Top 5 Signs That It's Time to Rebrand
1. Your Company Vision Has Changed
Has your company had a change in direction? This is one of the biggest signs it might be time for a rebrand. Your branding should reflect all that your company encompasses internally and externally. If your company has shifted focus, expanded, or the business model and strategy has changed, your branding should follow suit.
With ever-changing markets, new competitors, new clients, and new directions, it’s important to remain relevant and that starts with your branding. New directions should be exciting, and if your branding falls behind these new and exciting changes, it’s time to solidify the new purpose, mission, vision, and values of your brand to better reflect what you do and who you do it for.
Locking in your new purpose, mission, vision, and values sets you up for success and helps bring the future of your company into focus. Your company’s purpose should highlight the reason your company exists past making a profit. Money matters, but outside of that, ask yourself why you are passionate about your industry and how you serve it, and why the changes that have taken place in your company reflect this new direction. This will help you craft your updated brand purpose, ultimately creating a foundational level of trust and understanding of your company’s new direction with key stakeholders and customers alike.
Your brand’s mission should seek to highlight where you are now and why. The mission should break down where your company is today and why. Including brief history in your mission to show why the new direction has come into play will give your investors, audience, and customers an idea of where you came from and where you are now as a result. As your company grows and changes, it’s important for your mission to reflect that. Your mission statement should be concise and a forward-facing sentiment that delivers the heart of why your company is passionate about what it does.
Next up in the queue is crafting your company’s new vision. Your brand vision should encompass what you’re doing now, and how it will lead into the future of your company five, ten, or even 20 years down the road. Think about the internal and external goals you have for your company and think ahead. How will your company work to meet and exceed the internal goals set for the betterment of your industry and ultimately your customers? Your vision should be a clear picture of the ideal growth you wish to achieve with your new direction.
Lastly, with a new direction comes new values. In crafting your company’s mission, you reflect on where your company once was and how it has propelled the company forward to the present day. With a new mission, vision, and purpose, your company has more than likely experienced a change in values that led to all of these exciting changes. Your company’s values should reflect these meaningful and intentional changes.
As Gandhi once said, “Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.” People tend to align with the values of the companies they support, so it is important for your values to be meaningful and stand out. Your brand values should seek to help outsiders understand the value in the work your company does, and ultimately how your company works to uphold the standards in place.
2. Your Branding Doesn't Stand Out
In order to remain competitive in your market space, it’s incredibly important to stand out and differentiate your company from your competitors through your branding. While your branding may have stood out as unique at one point in time, the market is ever-changing, evolving, and growing with more competitors. Your original branding may be outgrowing itself as your company is expanding and changing, and while this seems like a potential negative, you can frame it positively by addressing and considering your current branding’s strengths and weaknesses in alignment with a new direction or growth focus.
Understanding how your current branding aligns with the growth and changes within your company is the first step in creating a laser focus on your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. This doesn’t mean you have to completely reinvent your brand, but rather, place a focus on the strengths of your current branding and carry that knowledge into your new branding focus should you decide to update your branding or rebrand entirely. If you want to understand the strengths of your current branding, it could be beneficial to conduct a brand audit.
3. You Have Attracted or Want to Attract a New Demographic
During your company’s growth, have you noticed a new or different demographic showing interest in your products or services? This is a good sign and presents a great opportunity to reevaluate your current branding and how it may or may not be serving that new demographic.
Maybe you’re looking to attract larger clients or speak to a different demographic in hopes of expanding your brand’s reach. Ask yourself if your current branding will attract your target demographics, if the answer is ‘maybe’ or ‘no’, it’s time to think about refreshing your written and visual brand representations to align with the new demographics.
When refreshing your branding to attract new and different customers or clients, it’s important to do an in-depth analysis of the demographics in question, paying close attention to buyer personas within. By taking a thorough approach to building out buyer personas, you will have a strong grasp of what your target wants in relation to your product or service, allowing you to build branding that appeals to these targets.
4. Your Branding Has Lost Focus Over the Years
A lot can happen over the course of five, ten, or twenty years. Markets are ever-changing and evolving which may lead the branding you created at the birth of your business to appear dull, out of touch, or inadvertently misaligned with your market and products or services as they are today.
Your branding is the image of your company that your audience associates with your products or services. If you have increased your product portfolio, services, or expanded on the demographics you’re targeting, your current branding may not align with these new and exciting changes. Take a look at your logo, colors, and messaging and ask yourself if you had never heard of your company before, would you grasp the essence of what this brand stands for? Does your current branding invoke a memorable response in comparison to your competitors?
There are a lot of great aspects that your current branding may already have that can be capitalized on and incorporated into the rebranding process to elevate your current branding with regard to your company’s history and current brand awareness. This can take the form of a different logo with the same colors or a new variation of the previous logo. There are a lot of strategic ways to tackle a refresh or rebrand. Remaining consistent and locking down brand guidelines can generate revenue as a layer of continued familiarity is created in your audience through consistent, impactful, and aligned branding.
What makes your brand unique? What do you do differently from your competitors? Turn that into a unique value proposition and use that as a guide to enhance your branding with what you do and how you do it differently.
5. Your Brand Name Doesn't Stick
When you created your company, a lot went into the name you chose and why you chose it. Thinking about changing your company name can be an emotional process as you have likely spent a vast amount of time and effort building your company to what it is today. Ask yourself if the name you chose at the forefront of your company’s success still aligns with the growth and changes of focus that have taken place since the beginning?
Your branding conveys your business’s internal and external culture and should be memorable to your target audience. Google was once BackRub and Instagram was once Burbn. Many large companies have completely changed their brand names over the years and remain successful through creating and maintaining consistent, unique, forward-thinking, and hyper-focused branding.
There is a lot to consider when changing the name of your company. Outside of branding, it’s important to think through how a name change would affect your current customers and revenue goals. Some of these considerations can be arbitrary because you aren’t ultimately going to know what changes will come about from changing your brand’s name. Evaluating your current branding as it relates to the market. How is your audience currently responding to your brand? Where does your revenue match up with your competitors? Although rebranding can be costly, sometimes it can be more costly to remain complacent with your current branding. If your brand is indistinguishable in your market space, it may be time to consider a new and different direction with your name, logo, and branding.
Considering a Rebrand?
As you can see, there is a lot that goes into considering a rebrand. There are a lot of questions to ask yourself before you take the leap into a new branding strategy. If you’re considering a rebrand, it should be an exciting process that ultimately creates alignment between your brand, what it stands for, your services, and your customers. While there are many reasons to rebrand, it is paramount that your brand speaks to what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and ultimately who you do it for.
Get Useful Branding Insight from LAIRE
At LAIRE, we place a lot of emphasis on impactful and strategic marketing. This starts with your brand and carries through to your customers. If you’re considering a rebrand, having an objective understanding of your current branding strategy in relation to your target audiences and the market is key in locking down branding that aligns with your company as it is today and who you serve as a result.
We offer a free 20-minute branding assessment to help put you on the path to creating an impactful brand. If you’re ready to dive into your current branding, our team of top marketing strategists is ready to give you valuable insight into your current branding strategies and where you can see improvements through a refresh or rebrand.
