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Rebranding Difficulties No One Ever Thinks About

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Your branding has more to do with your success than you might well have realised. It’s the public face of everything you stand for - the identity, the name, the logo, the values, the cause, the everything. It is what people associate with you when they hear your company name muttered. The problem is, so many solopreneurs, entrepreneurs and business people don’t place enough emphasis on this at the beginning and so they end up having to rebrand themselves a few months or years down the line.

Rebranding Difficulties No One Ever Thinks About

This is no bad thing. Like we said, branding is so important. However, it can be tricky to nail a rebranding project, as so many big names will attest. With that in mind, we’ve pulled together a few piece of advice to help you get it right and not go down the Tropicana-disaster route.

1. Know Your Audience

It is impossible to get your branding right if you don’t know who your audience is. Put it this way, you don’t want to be using the kind of slang terms and modern process Millennials are accustomed to if your target audience is seventy-year-old retirees. Now, a big part of the rebranding decision tends to come about as a result of you finding your niche or knowing who your ideal customer is, so make sure you speak to this directly, from imagery to copy.

2. Hire A Team In The Know

As we’ve alluded to a couple of times now, rebranding is a massive deal. So, aside from outlining the processes you can take on, bring on a team that knows how to rebrand. That means hiring a creative copywriter that knows how to make your words count. It means getting a web design agency that won’t just create an online image you love, but know how to do all the 301 redirects too, which is important for your web search rankings. It means bringing on a creative team that will know what visuals and direction are important to go down.

3. Look For Great Examples

While we only ever hear about the ‘whoops’ moments in rebranding history, there are plenty of success stories that you should know about, study, share with your team and learn from. And the one that stands out the most for us is Grubhub. When it began, it hit the ground running. But then Seamless came along with its super-polished branding and took over. That’s when GrubHub upped its game, but without losing the college student audience that got it off the ground in the first place. It was a move that was all about gaining more customers, without losing any.

4. Learn From The Big Mistakes

Following the triumphs that came before you is all well and good, but it will only work if you know about the mistakes made by other brands too. It’s that notion of learning from other people’s failures. You’ve got the ridicules Gap attempt, which is a lesson in how to waste money. You’ve got the $1million Pepsi move that did the same too. And, you’ve got the SciFi Channel’s attempt at being more hip and cool by calling themselves Syfy, without anyone checking to see if that had any other meanings, which it did - it means syphilis. Not ideal.

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