Scott Saunders | If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The concept of rebranding is something every business should consider. Companies over time can evolve their products, services, or audience, and many times need to update their branding accordingly. Sometimes a business needs to recover from a poor or negative reputation. Sometimes their original mission or offerings have changed and so a rebrand can help reposition it in the marketplace. While the benefits of a rebrand are abundant, there is a flip-side that one should consider.
Rebranding is complicated and comes with a cost. Whether the rebrand is a new logo, revised packaging, or even a renaming of the brand, the overall objective is that it needs to be a comprehensive rebrand. Every instance of the previous brand needs to be discarded. Launching a new look for a brand requires that all brand instances are converted within a very short amount of time. When a rebrand launch window is comprised of months and months — rather than weeks — the end result can be confusion with the audience about the brand’s new identity, which comes across haphazard and lacking clarity. The only gain being an increase, not in brand strength, but in consumer distrust. Bottom line, rebranding takes cost and commitment to harness the full power of a proper rebrand launch. But, unfortunately, many small businesses want to rebrand but lack the complete resources to do so. If that is the case, perhaps the time isn’t right for a rebrand.
Another reason rebranding should be questioned is that it may be just a band-aid for a deeper issue. Perhaps giving the logo a facelift isn’t going to help the business connect more with the audience because the issue isn’t the visual brand but perhaps the brand’s business strategy or misdirected and misguided marketing efforts. When businesses are looking around and seeing change, they mistakenly feel like a makeover is the right move. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it smart. Don’t change for the sake of change.
In 2009, Tropicana felt the need to be more relevant in a modern marketplace by doing a visual rebrand. Their original package design with their familiar typeface reminiscent of farming and iconic large orange with the straw sticking out of it was replaced with a very modern, all lowercase typeface a large glass of orange juice. The former conveyed to the consumer that their juice was natural and came directly from the fruit itself, while the new minimalistic and modern rebrand simply showed a glass of orange fluid and lacked warm and charm and lost its association with being all natural. The result? Tropicana lost 20% in sales immediately following its rebrand and within around 2 months, reverted back to their former packaging. While Tropicana felt they needed to modernize their brand, they forgot that one of the main purposes of the visual brand is for product identification and recognition by the consumer.
Sometimes a business will revise its name for the purpose of evolving and trying to be relatable. In 2002, PricewaterhouseCoopers created their business consulting offshoot and rebranded it after a day of the week — calling it Monday. Now while the brand name itself is a creative solution and a bold move (associating it with an overly common word), it fell flat and was abandoned after 12 months. The reason for this was the renaming had nothing to do with the business and, therefore, told the audience nothing about the business, which in turn conveyed nothing to the audience about why they should care about the brand. As was the case with Tropicana, there was a disconnection with the audience.
Sometimes a business will rebrand by revising their very offering itself. In the mid 1980’s, Coca-Cola was losing marketshare to its market rival Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi had launched a successful advertising campaign (“Pepsi Generation”) that aligned themselves with more youthful mindset. This also coincided with the “Pepsi Challenge”, nationwide blind taste-tests highlighting the choice of Pepsi over Coke. Rather than address how Coke could reconnect with the younger marketplace that Pepsi was dominating in, the Coca-Cola company decided to abandon its original cola formula for something that was sweeter like the competition. New Coke was introduced in 1985 and the results are something they could never have foreseen. Within weeks of launching, the company was receiving around 5,000 calls a day with complaints from loyal consumers. Within 3 months that volume rose to around 8,000 calls a day. This was after Coke had poured $4 million into consumer research with close to 200,00 blind taste tests between the old Coke and the new Coke prior to its rebrand. The unforeseen was the underestimated deep connection and emotional attachment many consumers had with Coca-Cola over the decades. Six months later, Coke released Coke Classic, bringing its classic formula back onto the market to much fanfare. New Coke stuck around — and was even renamed Coke II in 1990 — but eventually was abandoned in 2002, for which Coke had to discard $30 million worth of New Coke inventory.
The marketplace is always evolving in being more modern and, many times, brands can feel outdated and irrelevant. Many businesses feel refreshing the visual framework of the brand can help reengage with their audience and allow the brand to not be left behind. That a more modern or contemporary overhaul will be the solution. But be mindful that a rebrand should be avoided if the sole reason is because you are bored with it. If your brand isn’t doing a good enough job of differentiating itself in the marketplace, then a rebrand might be the solution, but it needs to be strategically implemented, creatively executed, consistently implemented, and not simply as a reaction to what others are doing. If it isn’t broke, there isn’t really a reason to fix it. But if it is broke, make certain you are fixing the right thing. Not just what everyone else is choosing to do as a “fix”. Doing it the wrong way, or at the wrong time, risks causing disconnect in the marketplace and the main purpose of a rebrand is to form or strengthen its connection with the audience.
