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I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
When, how and why to rebrand
Rebranding is scary. It's like getting a completely different haircut and colour. When I switched from brown hair to blonde a few years ago, even my big sister didn't recognise me momentarily. In rebranding, you change certain things people have used for identifying you and your business. Being afraid is understandable.
There are all the what ifs. What if I'll lose my clients? What if nobody will find my business anymore? What if it is a huge failure. Rebranding doesn't have to be a mess which leads you to failure.
In a Facebook group I saw a person asking about how to rebrand her thriving business. She had started the business with her partner and named it accordingly. However, the partner had turned out to have other, more pressing endeavours, so she wanted to adjust the business name to refer to only herself. Very understandable.
The answers were the ones to shock me. Yes, someone was telling how she had rebranded and it hadn't done any harm to her business. But there were others, who told her not to do such a stupid thing. She would confuse her customers, they wouldn't be able to find her and then some. Oh, no.
Depending on how the rebranding is done, it can be very effective. It can bring in new customers, fortify your brand with the current ones and even help you to streamline your business. Obviously, when done unprepared and with the wrong approach, rebranding can go horribly wrong. This is why you need to prepare well, do lots of research and really, really think why and what are you rebranding.
Below I have listed questions to answer before and during your rebranding process.
1. Why to rebrand?
There are many reasons to rebrand. A change in the services or the business in general is the most obvious reason. For example, if you used to be in web design, but decided to rebrand yourself as branding specialist, you will need to do, at least partial rebranding. Or if your business' name changes, the rest of the brand needs to change accordingly. Legal reasons could also lead for rebranding, or noticing that someone else has a very similar brand, from which you want to differentiate your brand.
Rebranding can happen for many other reasons and goals. A basic refresh, to streamline your business and its services.
Getting your brand more distinguished, making it stand out from the crowd. To add consistency and make your brand more unified. Ownership changes, adding or removing partners, merging businesses and such. Changes in the business type. Getting a new audience for your brand, expanding the current audience or focusing on a certain part of your current audience. Making your brand more relevant, bringing it to this century or adjusting to the new, perhaps younger audience. Polishing the brand image, especially after bad publicity, or taking distance to an old, but now stale, partnership. Personal reasons. The list goes on.
Deciding your reasons as well as the goals of rebranding is the first, and the most important step of rebranding. Whichever reasons and goals you have for rebranding, be clear about them. This will help you to decide if there is need for rebranding and define the answers to the following questions.
2. What is the scope of the rebranding?
Not everything about your brand necessarily needs to go through the rebranding process. Rebranding can be as simple as changing the logo, but most often it includes other visual and content related changes. There are several areas of your brand that can be affected by the rebranding. Below I have listed some parts of your business, products and marketing, which may or may not be affected by rebranding. The list is not comprehensive.
- Logos and icons
- Colours
- Fonts
- Photos and other images
- Social media headers and profile images
- Website design
- Business cards and other print material designs
- Product packaging
- Brand message
- Slogan
- Advertisement
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Videos, podcasts
- Bio texts (in social media etc.)
- Descriptive texts on the website and print materials
- Social media usernames
- Website domain and email addresses
Rebranding doesn't necessarily require changes to all of these, but choosing the parts the rebranding affects depends on why rebranding is done. For example, a change to brand name often, but not always, warrants changes to most of the areas of branding. Carefully list the areas you need to touch in rebranding.
3. What and who the rebranding affects?
Rebranding is usually more than just making a new logo. It involves every aspect of the business and more people than just you. If you are a solopreneur of any sort, and don't have employees, inside your business, the rebranding only involves you.
If you do have partners, cooperation or employees, the rebranding will affect them all. Additionally rebranding affects your audience and other relevant parties. Determine who your rebranding does affect, directly or indirectly.
Branding efforts always affect the ways your audience perceives your brand. Doing rebranding itself can affect (positively/negatively) the perception and the image of your brand. Make sure you are ready for the changes in the way your audience perceives your brand. Be prepared to all the options you can come up with, but also to all the options you cannot even imagine. Rebranding can have surprising effects.
Rebranding is usually not cheap. Even if you are only doing small tweaks to your logo, it can be costly. As a matter of a fact, making small changes to a logo can cost more than making a whole new logo. This depends greatly on what is done and who is doing it.
Don't think rebranding will be completely free, even when you are DIY kind of a person. New website domain name (the address of your website) costs. I highly recommend keeping the old one, at least for the time being, for redirection and more. New fonts and other new materials will also add to the costs of the rebranding. The time spent is also part of your costs. Time is money, you know.
You will need to budget every part of your rebranding, even if you do it yourself.
4. When to rebrand?
Rebranding changes can be done as one big bulk or it can be rolled in gradually. Especially in big rebranding, which affects many parts of the brand and might confuse the current audience, it is good to give rebranding changes a longer timespan.
The time spent on rolling the rebranding in depends on various things. How much time can you give to it? Do you have help with your rebranding, or are you doing it yourself? Do you want to make sure your old audience keeps up with rebranding? What is the scope of your rebranding? As an example, small changes to a logo can be rolled in very fast and don't require adjustment period. Define how long time your rebranding changes need to be rolled in.
However, rebranding itself can take lots of time, months or years. In the same way as branding generally, rebranding is a long process, in which the audience is acquainted with the brand, they will take time to form an image and, of course, the image will change in time. Branding is a process that continues, so rebranding also is done every day in every blog post, other social media post and business decision you make.
There are also times when it's best to refrain from rebranding. If you are very busy with your business and really don't have time for the effort rebranding takes, you must either make the time or push the rebranding forward.
Also rebranding right when you are in legal or other trouble is not a good idea. The ongoing troubles will affect the new branding badly and also may seem like whitewashing. While rebranding can help in polishing the brand image, sweeping the mess under the new carpet is not good for your brand.
Don't get into rebranding right when your competition is doing it, unless your rebranding is taking your business to a very different direction than your competition. Your rebranding may seem like desperate try to copy your competition, but it also may get overlooked because of your competition's rebranding is taking all the attention.
There is no set timeline for rebranding. Executing the changes takes usually time and is good to let to take its time. As any branding, rebranding doesn't happen in a snap of fingers, so you must let it happen its own pace. In a sense, you can think that you are rebranding every time you are posting a new Tweet, Instagram photo, blog post or publishing other new content.
Everything you do is branding. Everything you do every day is rebranding.
5. How the changes are published?
Rebranding can be done without further ado, by just making the switch without announcing it. Having said that, it can be confusing to your current audience. Plus why would you want to miss the possibility of creating buzz around your business with the rebranding?
Rebranding can be used as a way to gain new followers and more traffic to your website and even more sales. Take an advantage of your rebrand and make some noise about it. New logo or a change of website address are good excuses for a blog post, Tweet, Facebook post and Instagramming.
Better yet, write a blog post about the whole rebranding process, why it was done, what was done, how was it executed and so forth. It will give a glimpse behind the scenes, help strengthen the brand and create interest around it.
Especially if rebranding includes changes in website domain and other means of contact, you need to be careful with how the changes are executed. Just switching from the old domain to a new one will not cut it. Fortunately, nothing is lost. The old website domain (eg. helmikuu.net) can be redirected to the new one (eg. merviemilia.com). Furthermore, the old addresses of blog posts and other pages can be redirected to the new ones.
Similarly the old email addresses can be redirected to the new email addresses. You will need to do some configurations to your website and email settings, and probably tweak your website's .htaccess-file. If you are unsure, I truly recommend hiring someone to help you with these changes.
In social media you cannot create your own redirects. If you change your Facebook page's web address, Facebook creates a redirect from the old page to the new one. Changing the Pinterest username redirects users accessing your old username to your new one. Same thing is possible with your Etsy shop. Please note, at least Facebook and Etsy limit changes in addresses to a certain amount, so don't go trying to change them too often.
On Facebook there's also a possibility to merge your old page with your new one (which also creates a redirect), but this is a harder way to do it. Your new page has to have more likes than the old one, the pages will have to have very similar names and then some, for the merge to be possible.
On Twitter and Instagram changing your username is easy and it's not restricted. You won't lose your followers etc. for the change. These services don't create redirects, which means that people trying to access your old username won't be redirected to your new one. There's also a chance that someone else will take your old username after you change to a new one. This can possibly harm your brand, if people are still associating your old username to you.
There's a possible solution for this. It's not a perfect way, but a decent workaround. For example, when I switched from my old username to my current (@merviemilia) at Twitter, I created a new account for my old username immediately after switching to my new one. I set the old account as private, so that people can't follow it and I included my new Twitter username to my bio text. For those who don't read the bio text this doesn't do much good. But those who do, will know how to find me. The same can be accomplished at Instagram.
6. What will your rebranding look/feel/sound?
Your goals, reasons, the affects, the scope and the timetable and more affects the look, feel and sound of your rebranding. The design, the content, the whole brand identity depends on all the research you do. Don't do rebranding just because it looks nicer to you, but because of how it affects your business.
Thus rebranding must be more than indulging your own urges. The look, feel and sound of rebranding builds from why rebranding is done, for whom it's done and what it affects, the areas of your brand it affects and much more. There's no set look, feel and sound for any rebranding. Each rebranding must be tailor-made for the brand.
You can take a look at your competition, but instead of copying them, try doing something different. I've heard of people stealing logos from their competition. On top of being it's illegal and immoral, it's also foolish. Why would you want your brand to remind your audience of another brand? Why would you want to give free marketing to your competition? Your competition has at least slightly different audience or slightly different products, so your brands shouldn't look, feel and sound the same. They are not the same.
7. How to approach your rebranding?
Start with finding answers to the questions above. I have included some possible answers to the questions, but try to get answers that are beyond those. You can also answer the 10 questions, which are intended for personal branding, but can be adjusted for other branding too.
Look at your competition, define your (ideal) audience, do the research needed for the branding project. When you have your answers and your research, you can start your rebranding process. Remember, rebranding doesn't happen over one night and branding generally is an ongoing process. Give your brand time to grow and be established. Keep on researching and keep on studying and analysing what works and what doesn't. Make the adjustments needed.
As mentioned before, rebranding can have surprising effects to your business. Never ever take rebranding as a quick little side project you will do just like that. It takes time, effort and resources. I don't say this to scare you off of rebranding, I say this to prepare you. Be prepared to both successes and failures. But don't fret at the first failure nor take the first success as the sign of everything going perfectly right.
Rebranding, when done right, can be great for your business.
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