Companies pay quite a bit of money to agencies to re-brand themselves. As a former agency owner and corporate marketing leader, I’ve led re-branding efforts at more than 20 companies. Here’s a little secret: you can save a ton of money and do some of this yourself. Here’s the first post in a four-part series about how I go about it.
Begin with the end in mind.
In order to re-brand your company, you have to understand what you’re trying to create. There are four major elements to a brand.
Brand values
Brand values are the things your brand stands for and that you live every day. They need to be meaningful to you and your customer and authentic drivers of your culture. You should hire, fire, and reward your teams based on your values. You should have about four brand values. They should be able to be expressed in a word or a short phrase.
Brand values are what your brand stands for and you live every day. They need to be meaningful and authentic drivers of your culture. You should hire, fire, and reward your teams based on your values. Click To TweetCore brand statement
Many companies think of this as a tagline, but it’s broader. It’s the key message you will communicate to all of your audiences. It aligns market perception with reality. It needs to be simple and clear, and differentiate you from your competitors. It also needs to be true and relevant to your customers, and consistent with your values.
Brand personality
This is the voice in which you speak. You’ve heard that people don’t buy from brands, they buy from people. This is a way personalize your brand. Once you’ve created it, you need to use it consistently across audiences. It needs to be applicable to your collateral material. In other words, you have to choose a writing style that reflects that personality. It also needs to be a realistic, substantive personality.
Brand icons
This is the rest of the stuff – logos, fonts, colors, product names, layout styles, image styles, clothing, and music. It’s the stuff that the market sees representing your brand.
Now that we’ve defined what you’re trying to create, let’s get started with the process.
1. Ask a few pointed questions.
Re-branding starts with interviews. Identify stakeholders across your business spectrum, including:
- Customers who love you
- Customers who don’t love you
- Former customers
- Vendors or suppliers
- Internal employees at several levels
I like to have at least two of each type, which means you probably need to identify four to get two good interviews. Once you’ve identified these folks, start with these eight questions:
- What products or services does my company offer?
- Who are my company’s competitors?
- Who are my customers, either by name or by type?
- How am I different from my competitors?
- If we went out of business today, what would you miss the most?
- What do we do well?
- What could we do better?
- If you only had five words to describe our company, what would they be?
I like to record these interviews and either transcribe them myself, or have them transcribed. Of course, this requires you to ask if you can do this, but most folks are okay with it. This eliminates any bias when you start to analyze them.
In the next post, we’ll start to look at how to analyze these interviews.