From establishing the reasons for a refresh and conducting competitor research, to securing stakeholder buy-in and internally communicating changes – the challenges involved in launching any rebrand are significant.
In fact, so much energy goes into developing these new identities that by the time they are unveiled, companies often find they lack the infrastructure and energy to fully support and manage their brand as it enters the real world.
History is littered with examples of rebrands that never captured the imagination of customers or pushed their companies forward – and a substantial number of these might have stood a better shot had their post-launch process been properly planned out.
So, how do you ensure your new brand identity sticks the landing? Preparing just as thoroughly for the weeks and months after a rebrand as you did for its development can make the difference between a rebrand that stands the test of time and one that falls flat on arrival.
Below, we break down the challenges your identity has to face post-launch, and share our top tips to overcome these pitfalls and empower your new look to thrive.
3 challenges your rebrand rollout has to overcome
The brand rollout checklist is complete: your style guides are built, your team members are on board and your new identity is off the ground.
To keep it there, it’s really important you’re taking the time to properly nurture and support your new look. Doing that effectively requires a considered approach – one cognisant of the challenges ahead.
Challenge #1 – Addressing customer resistance
Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles your rebrand will face is pushback from customers.
It’s not just because humans are creatures of habit. In a world where social media and personalisation are at the tip of every campaign, chances are that many of your customers have formed strong emotional connections with your brand and what it represents.
Tampering with that balance by introducing a new name, image or identity to the mix risks causing upset among your customers and damaging that all-important metric: trust.
Although the route to rebuilding trust and customer loyalty can be a long and involved process, letting negative sentiment run wild in the weeks, months and years after launch can have severe repercussions for your rebrand.
You only have to look back at American retailer GAP to see what’s at stake when you get it wrong.
After investing months of time and an estimated $100 million into a new, more high-brow identity, customers struggled to relate. This gave way to a wave of negativity they never planned for, causing the brand to revert to its original branding just six days after launch.
Challenge #2 – Upholding a consistent brand
With the introduction of new visual elements, colour palettes, names and branding guidelines across your company, it’s imperative your teams do all they can to present a consistent image across every brand touchpoint.
The last thing you want when investing significant amounts of time, effort and money into new marketing materials is to water down your newly built brand identity with a disjointed appearance.
It doesn’t matter if a single old asset slips through the cracks, or an office in another region is slow to catch up. In today’s hyper-connected world, incoherence like this breeds confusion, distrust and chaos.
To present a strong brand identity to consumers new and old, you need every employee to understand your new identity – as well as how to activate and apply it – regardless of the office they work in or their role in your business.
Challenge #3 – Managing the ongoing logistics of your identity
Another major challenge your new brand identity faces in the journey to long-term recognition is logistics.
From being able to deliver on-brand content creation at the required scale to express your new identity, to ensuring individuals from across your business are kept on the same page at all times, the details involved in nurturing your ongoing rebrand can be enough to make even the most experienced brand manager dizzy.
And as the library of new assets grows from the hundreds into the thousands, maintaining control over your company’s new image only becomes harder without the right content creation and Digital Asset Management tools.
Combined with the addition of new hires to your teams and the small adjustments you may make as your identity matures – you can start to see the immense hurdle that logistics presents to a long-lasting rebrand.
5 tips for long-term rebrand success
There are many hurdles involved in executing a successful rebrand launch. But by overcoming them, you position your new brand on the path of long-term success.
To help you get there, these are our top 5 tips to give your new brand identity that all-important staying power.
1. Refine your communication strategy
Communication is one of the most important aspects to ensure your updated brand becomes a permanent fixture.
Whether that’s with employees throughout your business or customers across your markets, you need to ensure that anyone, at any stage in your journey, knows exactly what has changed, how it affects them, and why you decided to make this transition.
How you do this will depend on the specifics of your brand, but as a general rule of thumb, when you’re tired of repeating it, your target audiences are only just starting to get the message – so keep up the conversation as often as you can.
2. Invest in employee training and engagement
Over time, as your identity matures, your goals change, and perceptions shift, you’ll naturally start to make subtle changes to your tone, logo and more.
To make sure everyone throughout your company can remain both agile and on-brand from tweak to tweak, few things are as important to the ongoing success of your rebrand as employee training and engagement.
Your colleagues are the true activators of your brand from the moment it’s launched – any deviation from your old branding will reflect badly on you and your company overall. So the fundamentals of your updated brand must be drilled into your personnel long after the rebrand is rolled out.
Tools like centralised brand hubs can be a real asset in this regard. Containing everything from style guides to brand strategies, these tools can make immersing your colleagues in your living, breathing identity a seamless formality.
3. Gather feedback from your audiences
Feedback is the cornerstone of any successful rebrand rollout plan. It’s how you align your image with customer expectations, and deliver an identity that sticks in their minds for years to come.
So, after you’ve revealed your new look to the world, make sure you listen to what your audiences have to say.
People will probably have an opinion on your new look, be it positive, negative or somewhere in between. By capturing this insight, spotting patterns and addressing common criticisms, you can put your rebrand on the best footing for success, and garner some much-needed goodwill along the way.
4. Track data and make refinements
When you initially embarked on the rebrand process, you will have had clear goals in mind with what you wanted to achieve, be it reaching new audiences, raising revenue or boosting your brand equity.
So, to determine whether your rebrand is delivering against the KPIs you set out from the outset, it’s crucial that you continue to track relevant data in the period past your launch date.
While the specific metrics you need to track will be individual to you, some of the most common figures to keep an eye on in the weeks and months after the big reveal may include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a measurement of customer loyalty, often gauged through the provision of a single-question survey
- Social media engagement – a way of assessing how well consumers are responding to your new look and feel
- Customer retention rate – a figure that demonstrates how well you are retaining patrons post-launch
- Revenue growth – a way of determining the return the launch of your new brand has gained for your business
With this data in hand, you can gain the insight you need to make meaningful adjustments to your rebrand after launch and improve its long-term impact.
5. Utilise brand management software
Maintaining brand consistency. Educating global teams. Keeping on top of asset production. It’s no secret that managing the long-term deployment of your brand is a herculean effort – one you can’t afford to take your attention away from.
With so much on the line, you need to nail every campaign, keep teams on-brand, and manage your ever-growing library of brand assets. But that’s a huge ask for any brand manager or marketing team.
That’s why more and more organisations today are investing in broader, end-to-end brand management suites to ease the burden from their shoulders.
From enabling your entire team to organise, share and control your marketing assets in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, to empowering everyone to produce professional, on-brand assets at scale – these broad platforms are enabling modern businesses to create and manage their content with unparalleled efficiency and consistency.
Create a brighter future for your new brand to thrive
Revitalising your brand is a complex, costly and lengthy undertaking – one that can require the combined effort of your entire marketing department, a six-figure investment, and months of hard work.
But simply forming this identity is not enough. To succeed in the same way Old Spice and Lego have, it’s up to you to carry that image into the minds of new and existing customers, day in, day out.
Even the smallest inconsistencies in appearance or oversights in logistics can send your freshly launched brand crashing down. But with the right approach after this moment, you can build trust back among your audiences, inspire new customers into your ranks, and secure the future of your fresh new identity.
All it takes is a considered approach and the right rebranding tools – topics we hope this article has given you the advice and confidence to progress towards.
