Rebranding Process – 6 Crucial Steps to Successfully Rebrand Your Business

Have you been thinking about rebranding your business, but are unsure on the process to take? Well in this video, I break down the rebranding process and give you a successful roadmap to help you on your rebrand. When it comes to rebranding your business, it should be strategic considered and follow a clear process to give you the best results.

Follow this process to make sure your rebrand goes smoothly. And this is the exact process that we use with our clients at Elements Brand Management. Reflection and goals so the first step in the rebranding process is to ask these two important questions. Why are we rebranding? And what is the goal of the rebrand?

These two questions are crucial as the first one works out the extent of the rebrand that you’re going to need. And we actually have a previous video on this and it should pop up somewhere on top of the screen, which gives you the different types of rebrand because not all rebrands are created and the second question determines the focus of this project.

So what are you hoping to achieve with the rebrand? For example, if you wanted to mark a change, as Kier did recently in their business strategy and reposition them. Whilst maintaining heritage of the brand, but moving into the future, an overhaul, a complete overhaul rebrand, wouldn’t be the best choice.

Now they’ve gone for an evolutionary rebrand. So they’ve moved the brand forward. The visual identity has changed. The strategy has changed. They’ve slightly repositioned the brand, but they’ve maintained. The heritage of that brand, but they had to ask the questions, first of all, why are we rebranding? And what is the goal of this rebrand?

And the goal of the rebrand was to educate their audience on this new strategy, their rolling out and educate them on the new position that Kia wants to take in the market. Two more questions that are really good to ask at this stage are. Why now? So if you ask that question, you want to find out whether this is the right time to rebrand and asking why now we’ll give you a definitive answer.

And generally it’s the answer of why you’re rebranding in the first place which we talked about earlier. The second question is, what collateral do we need to produce? So at the end of this process, If you go through the rebranding process, what collateral is going to need to change? So we talking about vehicle livery, we talking about signage.

Are we talking about obviously logo websites, mobile apps, content, letterheads, business cards. Packaging products, anything you can think of that has your identity on it, your previous identity, what’s gonna need to change after this rebranding process. Now is a good stage to take stock or an inventory of all the collateral that you think you’re going to need to change, or that, you know, you’re gonna need to change at the end of this rebranding process and make a list of that and keep it somewhere for later.

Discovery and research. Now, this is the most important part of the rebranding process, the discovery and research. You do not want to take this step lightly at Elements, Brand Management. This is a step when we would do a brand audit, which is kind of like an MOT for your brand. And it helps to define the brand where it’s strong, where it’s not strong looks at the competitors.

It looks at the target audience. It looks at the layout of the market and it kinds to give a bit of a lay of the land, a recky for the rebranding process. So, first you want to look at your audience. So if you look at the bulk of your customers, Who are they? And do they match who you want your ideal customers to be?

So the current crop of customers that you get a lot of, did they match your ideal customers where you really want to be aiming for? Are they the same? If they are, you need to think a bit more about who they are, what their hobbies and interests, what makes them tick? Where do they hang out? What are some of the things that they do online?

What are some things they do ofline? What are their values, what their beliefs, if they don’t match. And you have this new ideal audience over here that you’re trying to reach again, you want to flesh out a bit more about who are those people? Where do they hang out? What are their hobbies and interests? What social channels do they use?

What are their values and beliefs? Anything you can think of to flesh out these people and create personas for them will help you going forward in this rebranding process. A great way to do this is to create a persona for each audience segment, if you can, but ideally for the ideal audience that you want to reach

create a persona for them. And what you want to do is you want to have the demographics. You want to list where they are, what their life looks like now. So what is the problem they’re facing currently? What is the solution? How does your brand product or service, how do you help them? What is the solution you give?

And how can you exceed that solution. How can you make that experience, that brand experience more memorable for them? If you can fill that out for your target audience, your ideal customer, this will give you a really good start to the rebranding process. Next you want to review the competition and be brutally honest here.

What do they do well? What do they not do well? And how are you different from them? You want to be looking at this now. So currently, how are you different from them? But this is something that later on, when you start looking into differentiation, things will come up. That happened in this stage. When you’re doing your research on your competition and the wider market that will come into your differentiation strategy, then you want to look at your brand objectively.

So you wanna look at everything your brand has your visual identity, your messaging, your marketing. Websites, social media, your business premises, your signage, everything that you can think of, that you can review that your brand currently is embodied in. And you want to take a good look at that. And you want to make sure that you look at what is strong, what needs to stay, what is something that is part of that brand intrinsically, and depending on the level of extent of the rebrand, you might be doing a complete overhaul, so nothing might be staying, but there might be some threads that you want to keep.

So, what is strong? What is something the things you’d like to keep, and then also think about the things that are. Holding you back, what isn’t quite right, what isn’t professional enough, or it doesn’t match with the brand that you are and make a list of those. Those are the things that part of this rebrand is going to address solidify, you know, take those out the game so that you can be a stronger brand overall.

So think about what is good about our brand and what needs improving, and even do this on a piece of paper and have two columns and have one side about what is good about the brand and what needs improving and keep that to one side for this. You should have a good idea now of who your audience is, your competition and wider market and industry, and also your brand where you are and what you need to improve.

Strategy. So this takes everything we’ve done so far and lays the crucial foundations of this rebrand. At this point in the rebranding process with our clients at Elements Brand Management we take them through a brand strategy workshop in this workshop, the goal is to define your core brand. So we work collaboratively with our clients.

We go through some exercises that draw out that core brand so that we can define it. We can clarify it and we can focus on what that brand is going to be. By now with the previous research we’ve done, you’ll have an idea. Where the gaps are in the market. You have an idea of who your competitors are. You have an idea of where the differentiation could come in, where are some ways that you could differentiate?

What could you lean on? What could you state claim to in that market? And depending on the extent of the rebrand, how far you want to go with everything? So what you’re looking to achieve with that in mind, you can start to look at your purpose, your vision, your mission, your values, and your position. How are you going to differentiate from that competition?

What position are you going to take up and also look at things like your brand attributes, your personality, your brand archetype, and how you can start to develop the core essence of what that brand is around the strategy and the research we’ve just done

Comment with a yes. If you’re looking to rebrand this year and if not what has been your favorite rebrand of recent years? Has it been Kia? Has it been burger king? Let us know in the comments below

Bringing the brand to life. So there’s a crossover here from the strategy step to this step, and that crossover exists in building the brand personality one of the important parts of our brand strategy workshops is identifying the brand architect mix and in doing so you start to bring the brand to life.

My go-to example of this and the brand personality and the archetype coming through is always Haagen Dass and Ben, and Jerry’s so two brands in the ice cream sector, but using different archetypes and having different personalities stemming from those archetypes. So Haagen Dass is the lover.

So was a very sensual intimate feel about Haagen Dass as a brand. Then you have Ben and Jerry’s another ice cream brand, which is used as the Jester archetype. So you have humor, you have a whimsical way about it. You have. Fun friendliness it’s childlike. So all these things come through the two different personalities, essentially they’re both ice cream brands, but you wouldn’t get Haagen Dass having a cookie dough flavored ice cream, not named that way or not named fish food. Two brands have different personalities. They are different brands, even though intrinsically they are the same product. And it’s from this personality and the differentiation strategy that you’re employing that the tone of voice, your sort of own brand language and messaging starts to develop.

And come through, you can see this in the previous example with Ben and Jerry’s. So the fish food side of things, the cookie dough all of these things have come out of that playfulness, that whimsical nature, they wouldn’t have had that if they hadn’t have developed, defined, and clarified Their brand archetype, their personality and their tone of voice.

Finally, after all this work, the thing that most people consider when they think of a rebrand we’re onto the visual identity. So why does this come at this point in the rebranding process? So the reason you wait until this point is because by now you’ll have a better understanding of your audience, the competitors, the market, how you want to differentiate.

What your personality is how your brand is internally. And therefore you’ll have some really good indicators and ideas of how that visual identity needs to be or how you can start putting things in place that is going to fit in with that internal brand. Your visual identity wants to be simple. It wants to be distinctive, appropriate and memorable.

So all these things are things that if you remember that your visual identity is about being a marker for everything, we’ve just done. So it is a anchor for your brand. It’s a visual cue, a visual hook. To remember your brand to identify it compared to other brands, but it only works if you put in the time to develop the brand strategy and that internal brand.

And you’ve done the research first in order to do that. So you want to work through this process in this order and don’t jump to the visual identity first, just because it’s the thing that everybody wants to do and move forward with you need to have a strategy first approach. Once you define your brand’s personality, you’ve got the strategy nailed and you’ve got that core brand developed.

It’s a lot easiest to do your visual identity. And the reason is, is because you will have a better idea now of what mood you’re trying to create, how you want your audience to feel how you want to use graphical elements, to explain and communicate certain things about your brand. But you can’t do that until you’ve actually defined the brand initially

Rollout and promotion.

So a lot of people think once you’ve done the visual identity, the rebrand is over well, it’s actually the start of the process. You’ve got this rebrand. Now you need to get that across all of those list of touch points we wrote down earlier on. So all the brand collateral was part of your brand. It needs to be rolled out across that, and you also need to educate your audience.

So you need to be communicating this rebrand to your audience in a consistent manner. So you want to have your launch and your rollout, and you want to do that effectively and you want to do it consistently. All your channels, all your touch points with your audience to make sure that the time and effort you put into that rebrand actually takes shape and make sense for your audience and your internal team to take on board.

And remember this, isn’t an overnight thing. This is something that you need to be consistent with. You need to have clarity, and you need to have focus, and it will take time for that to be embedded and the new direction or the, or the rebrand to take shape.

Now you have a process for rebranding. If you need help with actually rebranding your business, defining your brand strategy, or just improving, developing, and growing your brand. There is a link to a discovery call in the description below. If you book that you’ll speak to someone at Elements Brand Management and we’ll help you to build shape and grow your brand.

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Have a great week catch up soon and keep those brand’s unified