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Top Strategies to Rebrand A Successful Business

Branding
Rebranding strategies

Rebranding a successful and well-established business might seem counterintuitive. However, a strategically planned and successfully implemented rebranding exercise will rejuvenate business operations and generate new income channels.

Before looking at the rebranding strategies, let’s understand what exactly rebranding is.

 

What is Rebranding?

Rebranding means redoing an essential aspect of your existing brand. Companies may choose to rebrand when making changes in their business operations, creating a new brand identity, or when acquiring a new demographic or target audience and it can involve changes in things like the logo, brand fonts, etc. You can use rebranding as a smart business strategy to relaunch your brand and use it as a take-off point for word-of-mouth advertisements.

LEGO, a building block toy company, successfully implemented one of the most ambitious rebranding strategies.

During the early 2000s, LEGO was losing ground with its core audience (children) because of new competitors entering the market with similar products at lower prices. Instead of focusing more on retrying old marketing strategies, the company decided to diversify into other industries. LEGO started collaborating with famous franchises to create one-off models, making LEGO-themed movies, and establishing entertainment venues called LEGOLAND.

As a result of this complete rebrand, they were no longer just another toy company. Not only were they successful at attracting younger audiences, but also managed to capture the attention of mature consumers.

 

When Should You Rebrand?

Now, rebranding is not your everyday marketing strategy. So, here are some business circumstances where rebranding can reap generous rewards for your company.

Addressing damaged reputation

Negative feedback on social media, unwarranted data leaks, and unpromising product performance at scale can cause you to lose market share. In such cases, rebranding your entire company offers the best chance to regain the lost ground. Here, rebranding means making tangible changes in your workforce, policies, and product line-up to actually address the initial concerns.

Conforming to the terms of the Merger or Acquisition

It is not unheard of for brands to change and combine their names during mergers and acquisitions. Usually, this is done to preserve the goodwill of both companies. The joint front showcases their best qualities and allows them to penetrate their operations into new emerging markets. For example, after the merger, Raytheon and United Technologies combined their brands to become Raytheon Technologies.

International marketing

Rebranding can also help companies break into international markets. Rebranding can help your brand become culturally more acceptable and resonate with the local audience. Lay’s, the potato-chip manufacturing company, is well known for rebranding its names and products for local markets. For example, in Australia, they are known as Smiths, while in Mexico, they are known as Sabritas.

Read how we did it for one of our clients.

Change in the target audience

Sometimes, business revenue can get bottlenecked due to their over-reliance on a specific demographic of customers. This fixed image can be challenging to overturn. However, a simple yet calculated rebranding strategy can fix this issue. Old Spice managed to rebrand through ads with absurdist comedy scripts. It helped translate the coolness of the legacy brand for the younger audience.

 

Top 5 Strategies to Rebrand

Here are 5 strategies to help you rebrand your company.

1. Rethinking the core values of your brand

Companies are known to run rebranding campaigns when they change their mission, vision, or overall goal. Siemens PLM software rebranded itself as Siemens Digital Industries Software to account for the growing demand for digital infrastructure, product development, and optimization services.

At Rato Communications, we can help you develop effective strategies to communicate this change to the public without negatively impacting your bottom line.

 

2. Renaming your brand

Dunkin Donuts renamed its brand to just Dunkin to align its business image with its current product offerings. After all, Dunkin isn’t just a donut company anymore; it has diversified into baked confectionaries. It also helped that their slogan, ‘America runs on Dunkin’, lacked the word donuts, to begin with.

Renaming your brand requires moderate effort from your strategy and communications team. You have to focus on creating multiple ad and marketing campaigns. These campaigns should portray that only the name has changed, but the core value remains unchanged.

At Rato Communications, we are adept at developing highly focused visual campaigns to get this message across to your audience.

 

3. Revising brand taglines, slogans, logos, or mascot

Revising your slogan, taglines, logos, or mascot is easier said than done. Most companies, like McDonald’s, Apple, Pizza Hut, Slack, Taco Bell, etc., have changed their logos over the years to keep up with modern aesthetics. Mostly, they do not require any major campaigning as these changes are subtle and might be missed by people who are not design enthusiasts.

However, changing your taglines and mascots requires a deeper effort. Before doing this, you should communicate to your existing audience the reasons behind the change and how this decision won’t impact the company’s vision and goals. Recently, M&M changed its mascots to keep itself more aligned with the current audience demographic. But, due to a lack of communication, this change was met with major backlash.

At Rato Comms, we specialize in strategic communication that can help you transition to new mascots, taglines, and logos while avoiding a negative perception.

 

4. Establishing a new brand identity

When changing your brand identity, only making changes to your color palette and your logos is not enough. You also need to change your brand voice. Companies undertake this change to make themselves stand out in various communication channels, like emails and social media platforms.

A company’s brand identity and voice are almost always deferential and caring so as not to offend its customers. However, dBrand took the risk of establishing its brand identity as that of an angsty teenager. And it was a massive hit. People reacted with great enthusiasm and praised them for breaking the corporate stereotype.

 

5. Redefining your target audience

Redefining your target audience can be challenging for legacy brands. It requires immaculate analysis of existing customer insights and running variate tests to find what is working. Such elaborate strategy building might not be every company’s cup of tea; however, it can be very rewarding when implemented right. For example, through pricing and marketing strategies, Gucci could rebrand itself from an exclusive brand for high-income adults to an accessible brand for progressive young adults.

At Rato Communications, we can help businesses create their brand development and marketing strategy that also involves redefining your target audience.

 

In the end

Employing a successful rebranding strategy can help you gain lost ground, facilitate a well-accepted product or target audience diversification, enhance the company’s value, and attract and close more sales. It can also help you stand out in this highly competitive market.

However, these strategies are resource-intensive, and missteps can end in disastrous results. That is where branding experts come in.

At Rato Communications, we help you identify your unique rebranding roadmap to success—from brand development and communication to your go-to-market strategy. We bring in our consulting expertise to help you get out of a branding rut and clearly articulate your brand value.

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