Rebranding: Why & When?
Unlock market potential, while retaining brand equity.
By Adam Charlton · 02/12/2024
Posted in Insight
The function of a brand is to identify your company/ service/ product and differentiate you from your competition. Ideally, the branding does this in such a way by clearly communicating corporate values central to your company.
As a business owner, brand equity is one of your most valuable assets. Brand equity is the value of the consumer’s perception of the brand.
“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organisation.— Marty Neumeier
Benefits of rebranding
A better-positioned brand results in improved sales figures, and increased market share in the long-term.
Overall, a more relevant and modern visual identity future-proofs your brand whilst improving its recognition. It avoids trends to ensure it will remain relevant to your business and customers for the foreseeable future.
Your updated brand identity is a vessel to hold your audience’s brand equity.
When is the right time to rebrand?
There are two categories when we think of the reasons why an organisation will need to rebrand. Active and reactive.
Active rebranding
Growth — A period of fast organisational growth makes your current branding feel immature and no longer relevant to your organisation.
New product or market positioning — Connecting new audiences to increase market share.
Modernisation and image refreshing — Your organisation’s brand has been left stuck in time, and in need of a visual update.
Reactive rebranding
Differentiation & market competition
New corporate vision
Changing markets
Acquisitions and mergers
Legal, including trademark disputes
Rebranding approach
The rebranding process begins by asking three questions:
What are the current pain points caused by your existing branding?
— What is it that’s keeping you up at night about your current brand, function, loss of differentiation and thus dilution of market share
Why is the thought of rebranding so stressful?
— Loss or recognition, quantity and scope of touchpoints
The most important rule of rebranding is not to disrupt the brand equity that your current identity holds. Often, rebranding will encompass a corporate refreshing, or modernisation, rather than a complete overhaul of every brand element, which will quickly destroy brand equity. To help protect brand equity and retain recognisability, we will often advocate to include aspects of the original brand, which could be particular shapes, forms and colours that are iconic to the brand.
Branding should communicate your corporate values and mission by being appropriate, considered and simple. Simplistically helps the brand stand the test of time, ensuring it remains relevant long into the future.
To consistently achieve the above for our clients, we follow a strategic approach that includes discovery, brand audit, ideation and revision, and, finally, the new brand roll-out.
Are you a Brighton-based business looking to rebrand or create a new brand? We might have something in common…
We’ve been busy building our sister agency in Hong Kong and recently relocated to Brighton! As we establish our branding agency, we’re looking to partner with local companies that want to refresh their brand. We’re running significant discounts to help build our local success stories.
If you would like more information, please get in touch with us at studio@attendtheway.com
About the author —
Adam is the co-founder of Attend The Way, a Brighton-based branding agency. Adam helps build brands for companies at every growth stage, from startups to industry leaders. Adam has consulted and built brands for some of the world’s most recognised companies.
