By Eben Greene
Like meeting someone for the first time, your initial encounter with a business can leave a lasting impression. That feeling or belief in a company or product brand is powerful. It creates customer loyalty and energizes the market.
Businesses are constantly evolving; introducing new products; merging and consolidating operations. Changes like these can be disorienting to your brand, and to your customers. Communicating a consistent brand message during times of growth and change is more important than ever. Today, we see a renewed interest in re-branding efforts to "bring back that special feeling."
While some business leaders have embraced branding strategy to fuel positive growth, it is easy to forget that a brand is dependent on the true feelings of the customer. For example, Starbucks Chairman Howard Shultz recently issued a warning to top executives that the "Starbucks experience" has been watered down. "I take full responsibility myself, but we desperately need to look into the mirror and realize it's time to get back to the core and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks experience," Schultz said in the memo.
Ultimately, customers want to have an authentic and positive experience with your company. If they trust and respect your products and services, they will become invested in your brand.
Re-branding is like farming. If you nurture the soil, you can continue to renew and multiply your harvest. In the same way, if you stay connected to your market and nurture customer relationships, your brand will evolve and flourish. Traditional farming is free of pesticides and additives-it is a pure. Similarly, successful re-branding aligns with your true voice-unique differentiation based on lasting values, not passing trends. In farming, uprooting your crops (brand) over to a new plot is not always a sustainable strategy. Maybe all you need is to pull a few weeds. A farmer has respect for his land. It is wise that a company shows the same reverence for their brand. Here are three questions to ask if you are considering re-branding your company or product.
1: Evolve or transform?
Too often, a perfectly good visual brand is put into the recycling bin in favor of something new and different. This is a shame for a brand that really only needs an update to its verbal messaging, or a few minor visual refinements (colors, type, images, etc.). Changing for change sake may look good; however, it often lacks substance and confuses customers. You can choose to gradually evolve your brand visually and verbally, or prepare to transform it. To do this right you should carefully plan (look at competition, listen to customers and think about the future), avoid rushing the process or settling for copycat trends, prepare to make a big splash, and respectfully communicate with your customers.
2: Relevant or radical?
Think of the amount of re-branding you need on a scale of one to 10. Sometimes you need to simply re-brand to remain relevant in your market and ahead of competitors. This would be adjusting up from a seven to a nine. Payless Shoe Source, for example, recently re-branded. It made a radical brand shift from a two to a nine. It was 25 years over due, and it looks new again.
3: Is it meaningful?
The ultimate goal of re-branding is to better connect with your market. Understand what your company or product means to your customer. Your reason for being is more than your position statement or tagline. Your brand will always say something no matter what you do. That means you have the opportunity to strive to make it meaningful. If you don't, your brand/message will simply be filtered out of your customer's overly crowded mind.
No matter how your business responds to change and growth, do not forget that your reputation is your brand. Respect your brand roots (values, emotions and ideals). These will help you connect to customers and produce more fruit.
Featured Client: Capitol City Press
This summer, we had an exciting opportunity to execute a complete rebrand for Capitol City Press, a respected, employee-owned commercial printer based in Tumwater. Their vibrant and dynamic company culture was obscured by a brand that was essentially a patchwork of accumulated marketing ideas that were not anchored by a unifying voice and visual identity.
Through our intensive discovery process, we identified several core values and distilled them into a single idea that embodies what makes them special: their can-do team attitude. Hence, the new brand position/tagline: "Print Positive". From there, the Eben Design team collaborated to turn the vision into reality. The result is a sophisticated logo, an engaging website and a cohesive, meaningful brand message that Capitol City Press has fully embraced as a clear and authentic representation of their past and their future.
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