Is it Time to Rebrand?
If you’re running your own business, you have so much more to take into account than simply making products or stocking a shop. As well making sure you have the best team of employees to face the challenges that being in business can bring, and ensuring you’re compliant with all the laws governing your industry, one of the most important things you need to keep track of is your brand.
It’s a difficult task because your brand is hard to assess: it’s your business’ personality and finding an objective measure of the extent to which a personality is ‘successful’ is tricky! Businesses have at least one advantage of people here: it is possible for businesses to overhaul their brand, changing their personality in the hope that it will attract more people.
A rebrand is expensive and fraught with risk. It’s something you should do only if you’re certain it’s necessary, but how can you be sure? Today we’re taking a look at this vexed question to help you feel confident when the time comes to make your mind up.
The Benefits of Rebranding
In many ways the benefits of rebranding speak for themselves: when revenue is down, and customer engagement falls, it could be that your brand is not speaking to people in the way it once did. There are plenty of reasons why this could be the case – if your brand has become associated with some negative publicity, it can be difficult for customers to see the positives about what you have to offer. Sometimes a simple change in popular culture means your brand starts to lose its persuasive power: if you’ve leant hard on an image of traditional masculinity for example, to sell an idea of strength, reliability or competence, you may find that in recent years customers have found this less persuasive.
The Risks of Rebranding
Rebranding is not a guaranteed success. Even if your existing branding decisions aren’t driving the customer engagement you want to see, changing them risks disrupting even the low levels of recognition you’ve built up so far.
What you need is objective, fact-based insight into your market, that can tell you the likely outcome of the changes you’re planning, and help you assess if the investment you’ll make in rebranding will pay themselves back as higher engagement and sales in the future.
Market research firms specialise in just this problem. Finding the right one to partner with gives you access to their branding intelligence: the insights you need to know if it’s time to rebrand, and pursue it with success.