Top 20 Rebranding Mistakes

Every brand needs refreshing to stay relevant as markets evolve. Smaller companies and non-profits are not immune. Like larger brands, they too have brand positions that need to be enhanced. Define your brand or be defined.

Smart marketers evolve their brands over time to keep them relevant. Some do it well, while others become the target of cynical bloggers. To gear your next rebrand for success, sidestep these all-too-common mistakes:

1. Clinging to history.
2. Thinking the brand is the logo, stationery or corporate colors.
3. Navigating without a plan.
4. Refusing to hire a branding consultant without industry experience.
5. Not leveraging existing brand equity and goodwill.
6. Not trying on your customer’s shoes.
7. The rebrand lacks credibility or is a superficial facelift.
8. Limiting the influence of branding partners.
9. Believing rebranding costs too much.
10. Not planning ahead for adaptation.
11. Bypassing the basics.
12. Not calling the call center.
13. Forgetting that people don’t do what they say. (They do what they do.)
14. Getting strong-armed or intimidated by consultants.
15. Putting the wrong person in charge.
16. Strategy by committee.
17. Rebranding without research.
18. Basing a rebrand on advertising.
19. Tunnel focus.
20. Believing you’re too small to rebrand.

Posted on by Daniel

Ingredients and Qualities of Good Brand Naming

Naming is an important part of branding a product or a business. More than that, an important first step when naming a business, product or service is to figure out just what it is that your new name should be doing for you. The most common decision is that a name should explain to the world what business you are in or what your product does.

On a very fundamental level, there are two basic ingredients of the best evocative names:

Differentiation

A competitive analysis is an essential first step. How are your competitors positioning themselves? What types of names are common among them? Are they all projecting a similar attitude? Do their similarities offer you a huge opportunity to stand out from the crowd?
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The Origins of a Historical Brand Image

Part of the 100 most famous and influencing pictures in history, the Marlboro man image has an interesting story:

This is C.H. Long, a 39-year-old foreman at the JA ranch in the Texas panhandle, a place described as “320,000 acres of nothing much.” Once a week, Long would ride into town for a store-bought shave and a milk shake. Maybe he’d take in a movie if a western was playing. He said things like, “If it weren’t for a good horse, a woman would be the sweetest thing in the world.” He rolled his own smokes. When the cowboy’s face and story appeared in LIFE in 1949, advertising exec Leo Burnett had an inspiration. The company Philip Morris, which had introduced Marlboro as a woman’s cigarette in 1924, was seeking a new image for the brand, and the Marlboro Man based on Long boosted Marlboro to the top of the worldwide cigarette market.

Via the excellent Coolz0r – Marketing Thoughts

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Defining Branding

While discussing earlier about the concept of branding and how to define it I just found a very nice blog post on the matter which I’ll quote here:

When you have a great (or bad) experience with a restaurant/ airline/ hospital/ website, what do you tell your friends about? Do you echo the messaging from their advertising? Do you say, “Hey, try them, because they had the coolest logo”?

The brand is the customer experience.

And that’s all it is. It’s not primarily a story, or a logo, or a style, or even a value proposition. Primarily the brand is just what customers tell each other about: their experience.

So if you want to create a good brand, the best – perhaps the only – investment to make is in the customer experience. This means learning from customers through direct observation, and crafting a strategy built from that customer input

Once the customer experience is set, the other elements – aesthetic style, consistent messaging, value proposition, iPod-ness, Coke-ality, all of those wonderful ideas will take care of themselves.

via

Posted on by Daniel

Key Elements of Small Business Branding

Jay Lipe is CEO of EmergeMarketing.com and the author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses : Tips, Techniques and Tools to Improve your Marketing is identifying the Keys to Branding Your Small Business.

Name: the First Step

How different would you be if your name were Clem or Matilda? Your company name sets a tone for your brand, right from the start. Names can be generated from invented words (Xerox), initials (IBM) and founder’s names (Johnson & Johnson). Some of the best names, though, communicate a benefit (U-Haul or Budget Car Rental).
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Five Steps for Branding a Professional Services Firm

The Denver Business Journal is running an interesting article presenting five essential steps to take for branding a professional services firm.

The key point of the article is however expressed in the beginning:

To most of us, the term “brand” conjures up an identifying symbol, a catchy phrase, or a trademark that a company uses to identify and advertise its product. However, the true purpose of a brand goes well beyond sending a series of impressions into a target market to create a response. A brand makes a promise; it pledges quality to the user. Brand success is critical in the professional services firm where the people are the product and the brand must be lived to ensure that the promise is fulfilled.

Than, the five proposed steps, are no less interesting:
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Using Branding to Attract Best Employees

Conventional wisdom tells us branding is for external communication ant it aims to influence current and prospective customers. But this view of branding is too narrow. Branding should (and is) used on a large scale in order to attract and retain talented people in your company. Actuals and potential employees are also part of the branding target.

Several surveys have been done to identify various corporate attributes which will attract talent. Here is a condensed list of 10 most popular (brand) attributes and are listed below in the order of their popularity. Continue reading →

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On Brand Loyalty and the Future of Branding

“Brand loyalty will diminish as the defining metric of success. Marketing strategies will become more varied. Some brands will be so strong that they will exist independently of specific products and services. Other brands will make a splash and then disappear. And a new kind of ‘generic’ brand will emerge: not bland, low-priced generics but anonymous, unmarked — yet highly stylized — products that are meant to take on the identity of the person who buys them. People will brand their own clothes, their own shoes, and so on.”

via

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Infuse the Brand Into Consumer Culture

From Fortune 500 companies to government agencies, branding can be poorly executed and frightfully expensive.

[Re]-branding doesn’t mean recycling with new slogans and logos, it means a comprehensive do over. And establishing a brand is only the beginning, as advertising, marketing and public relations follow with even bigger budgets to extend the brand and infuse it into consumer culture.

For those who do it right, the rewards are often off the scale. Continue reading →

Posted on by Daniel