This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Rebrand for the right reasons
Evolving a brand is a really, really tricky endeavor. And a lot of people think that when a new brand manager comes on board, the brand should be reinvigorated or revived or revised. The only people that really like brand changes are brand designers and brand managers – that’s it. There’s no consumer that has ever gone to a shelf, see that their brand is changed and be excited. The reptilian brain is engaged when that happens, when they see something new, and that reptilian brain is there to protect us from uncertainty and any feelings of vulnerability. When we see something that we haven’t seen before, we react with skepticism: Why is this different? Am I getting less and paying more? Is the ingredient changing? Am I going to have a different experience if I purchase this thing that has suddenly changed? Why wouldn’t my experience be different if this has changed?
My recommendation for making any brand change is when the mission or the values of that brand are different. If the ingredients are different, certainly you can communicate that, but same taste brand new look has never engaged anyone’s imagination. If anything, all it really does is provide an inner eye roll in the mind of the consumer. Brand changes should be managed very carefully and only when there’s something important that you want to communicate to the consumer. If it’s done for any internal reason, it is a waste of time, it is a waste of money, and it is unfair to the consumer, who doesn’t really care about what’s going on in your company, unless it’s something that is going to benefit them. It’s then, and only then that you should change something.
Create a 360 experience
When developing your brand. When you do decide that the time is right to either reinvigorate or introduce a brand to the world, it’s way more than a positioning and a logo. If you think about a really well known logo – like the Nike swoosh – the Nike swoosh has been part of the vernacular of our culture for decades now, but when it was created, it was initially created by a college student. It was done overnight for Phil Knight. When he first saw it, he wasn’t entirely sure he even liked it and asked for some time for it to grow on him. Why is that mark so popular? Why is that mark so popular? If you look at it deeply, you can see that it also happens to be the Newport logo upside down, the Newport cigarettes logo, which almost feels like the complete antithesis to everything that Nike stands for. And it’s also the capital one logo on its side.
So why is the mark so popular? Is it the mark itself, that device, or is it the marketing? And I contend that it is the marketing, which is more than the positioning and more than the logo. It needs the positioning as its foundation, and it needs a logo to be able to communicate telegraphically, but it also needs so much more. You need vibrant, deep storytelling. You need to create a brand narrative that needs to be extended on the website, on social media, through talking with people that might be spokespeople or influencers that believe passionately in the brand, those zealots that can communicate really meaningfully about what the brand means to them. It also has to extend, most importantly, into the product itself and what that brand is delivering to the consumer. It needs to be embedded in every single touchpoint that the brand is engaged with. It needs to be a full 360 experience that includes every gesture internally within the company and every expression of that brand externally to the audience, to the people.