Global Rebranding Checklist:

Is it time to rethink your company’s branding? If so, we at NVISION know that it’s no small undertaking. So, we’ve provided a helpful, smart rebranding checklist to ensure your efforts are successful. Learn how to get internal buy-in, estimate your costs, rebrand without breaking the bank and exceed expectations.

Why should businesses rebrand?

Refreshing your brand can have a significant impact on your business—often boosting relevance and propelling growth.

One famous example is banking giant Wells Fargo, which began in the1850s as a company delivering mail, packages and other goods (and sometimes gold) cross country via stagecoaches. “The Wells Fargo Wagon” was even made famous in 1962’s Tony-winning musical, The Music Man.

But, once highways connected cities and towns throughout the country and railroad systems evolved, Wells Fargo realized that its place in the shipping and delivery market was changing. What stood out about Wells Fargo was that it kept customers’ valuables safe. Safety, security, and trust. This, Wells Fargo learned, is what people associated with their brand, and why customers chose it.

Wells Fargo wisely embraced this “rebrand,” and today, they are the third-largest bank in the United States of America. It’s one reminder that branding should always reflect how the brand is seen in real-time (and how you want it to be seen) not how the brand was viewed in the past.

Consider the following

Budget: If your rebrand includes a new color palette, logo, tagline, voice, style guide, etc., you may need to create all new marketing deliverables including marketing collateral, corporate stationery, signage, websites and more.

The actual cost is a bit harder to define. Typically, consumer-facing companies spend more and B2B companies spend less. Larger businesses also will often spend more than smaller ones. That said, a good rule of thumb is to estimate about 10% – 20% of your annual marketing budget.

Timing: This also varies from company to company. But, here are a few questions to consider:

• Do you have an agency partner? Do you need one? If so, how long will an agency search take?
• Are you conducting research? If so, how many internal stakeholders, external customers and possibly prospects are you interviewing? Do you have a research firm? Will you conduct one-to-one interviews to gather qualitative data or online surveys which produce more quantitative data?
• How many internal stakeholders will you include in this process? (More people equals more time).
• Will you be renaming your brand? If so, you’ll need to work with your legal department and begin to search and identify what names and corresponding URL options are available to trademark your new brand.

Making sure everyone is aware of the timing of the rebrand can save you from making wasteful buying decisions. If you normally stock six months’ worth of marketing materials, but the rebrand is launching in two months, changes to buying strategies need to be made. Without proper communication and planning, you may end up with a warehouse full of obsolete materials.

Once you’re aligned on the budget, timeline, external partners and internal stakeholders, you’ll be ready to get started.

4 Steps to successfully rebrand your brand 

Step 1: Conduct internal and external research

There are many third-party research firms that will work with you strategically and tactically. They will help you draft the survey questionnaire, conduct offline or online surveys, compile results and provide a detailed, data-driven report. The research results and key learnings will be critically important to successfully accomplish the following steps.

Step 2: Identify your brand’s voice

The survey will ask questions to help you identify:

• Brand attributes
• Value proposition
• Points of differentiation
• Buyer’s journey and personas
• Gaps

You’ll use this data to create your brand guide. This guide will help you develop your brand voice and communicate that voice within your value proposition, key messaging themes and supporting copy that’s included in all your marketing deliverables online and offline.

Step 3: Sharing with your “best” brand advocates (your colleagues)    

Once you’ve done all the heavy lifting, it’s time to flip the switch and turn on your new brand. At least inside your own walls.

It’s important to communicate what you’re doing and why. Explain what you learned from the research project and how that translates into the new brand look, feel and voice. Also, make sure to highlight how you’re going to communicate this new brand to your customers, prospects, community, media and more.

A fun way to engage your colleagues (and brand stewards) is with an official “kick-off” event. A celebration is a powerful way to boost employee morale and drum up internal buy-in and enthusiasm.

Step 4: Launching your brand externally

The final step is the external execution. A successful rebranding is re-introducing your brand to the public. You can launch your brand with a media event, or large-scale awareness campaign. But regardless of how you launch your new brand, the most important thing is to be consistent.

You need to make sure that all public-facing touchpoints such as your marketing collateral, letterhead, business cards, website, social media channels are brand consistent. Don’t forget this includes business communications as well as marketing communications. So, all invoices, business forms, envelopes and – yes – your storefronts should all feature your new logo and tagline.

Track and measure brand engagement

For the first six months to a year after undergoing a corporate-wide rebranding, your tracking, analyzing and reporting of engagement data should be running on overdrive.

If you rebranded to boost awareness, you should regularly measure brand recall, brand awareness, and overall market share for several months afterward. Usually, you should see a noticeable uplift in brand metrics within 4-6 months.

At the same time, keep your external and internal feedback loops open and healthy, asking: “Which aspects of the new brand are working well, which ones are not and how do we improve?”

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When evaluating your brand consider whether it supports your company’s business plan and its future direction. If not, ask what would it take to improve that brand experience? For many corporate marketers, the answer is rebranding. From securing internal buy-in to conducting research to reintroducing your new brand to the world, a rebranding can be the best thing that ever happened to your business. But only if you do it correctly.

That’s where we can help. NVISION provides a single strategic view across your entire marketing operations helping you make truly informed decisions, streamlining processes, cutting waste, improving efficiencies and boosting ROI.

We partner with leading Fortune 1000 brands to leverage our experience and buying power for the procurement of printed materials like displays, direct mail, signage and collateral to fulfillment, distribution and project management. We don’t just consult and make recommendations, we execute and are accountable for your entire marketing supply chain process.

NVISION is a part of North American Corporation, which is celebrating their 100^th Anniversary this year. With a century of supply chain management experience and three decades of marketing execution expertise, we have the stability, experience and innovative approach to bring your new brand to life. Let NVISION help unlock savings by streamlining your processes and improving your results.

Check out NVISION today.