Rebranded! Now what next?

TotalEnergies come to mind very quickly when you think about corporate rebrands as a TREND but to begin with, it really is not one. Year in, year out, companies have always re-presented themselves to the public, for various important reasons from signifying a change of mission, flagging off a merger, accompanying a new name, and so on.

While the rebrand and the motivations behind them get the headlines, much more less is known about what these companies do in the months and years that follow to make the process worth the investment and achieve its goals.

The goals of a rebrand is never fully attained at launch. The unveiling rather signifies the beginning of that journey of change as people gradually get familiar with the the new look and attributes of the brand. The logo, name, colour and visual system may have changed but the real destination of change is in the minds of people and the success of this transformation rises and falls on a number of key factors.

Launch

A brand that has appeared in a certain way to many people over the years needs to strategically consider how it introduces its new look or risk the chance of confusing people and attracting criticism. Talking about criticism, every major rebrand has been trailed by some but the best examples tell a story and bring the audience into the thinking that went behind the scenes. You want to share the why, and how the new look strengthens the mission or captures a new phase.

Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard Chief Marketing Officer, speaking with Forbes on their rebrand:

We are not only gearing up for, but actually trying to shape (the) digital future... We, therefore, felt that it was time for us to evolve our brand identity to reflect this — on the pillars of simplicity, connectivity, seamlessness and modernity.

Standards—Beyond guidelines

Everyone knows about the “Brand Guidelines”, which is sometimes called the Corporate Identity Manual, Brand Spirit Book or Brand Bible, but there needs to more to them than ticking off the checklist of project deliverables. The focus needs to be an underlining will to uphold the identity of a brand so that its consistent enough for people to remember and not confuse with other things.

There needs to be sufficient thought about the context within which the brand will come to life, and who the key players would be. This should influence how the standards system, which should not be limited to the Brand Guidelines doc, is designed. Some of the best examples include brand web portals that help to simplify access and increase compliance. At FourthCanvas, we started creating short video summaries of the guidelines as well, to provide a faster alternative that covers the most consequential parts of the standards and reduces the hurdle for third-party vendors who sometimes don’t seem to have the will to study the full guidelines. This has especially been true with many of our clients’ vendors over the years and that inspired our innovation.

One more step to increase the efficacy of brand guidelines systems is in templates. An effective way to go about that is to have some designed examples made with the major content types of the brand and prepared in source files of applications/softwares that the internal team is proficient with.

Brand Managers & People

While it is important that the standards systems are well designed, brand sustainability requires more than automation. Discretion and intuition are important to achieving consistency without being rigid (more on this in the last section). That said, the most important factor here is the quality of expertise. Designers and communication people need to be able to make the call on when to bend or explore beyond the basic standards but they (or at least one person who is a part of the setup) need to have the requisite level of expertise and experience that can help ensure the brand is preserved.

Brand Managers—employed in-house for this very purpose—help to fill this gap in many situations. In even more intentional examples (and where the budget supports it), companies add to that setup the engagement of brand design agencies, mostly the ones that worked on the rebrand, on running retainers to provide some sort of policing, or guardianship for the brand.

Brand Health Tracking

Since we are talking “health”, we can use the analogy of medical check-ups. Think about how a man or woman can continue to look good and radiant on the outside while some real serious internal problem is setting up behind the scenes. But they can begin to do something differently if they find out in good time. That’s life-saving feedback and it applies to brands too.

Using surveys, data gathering and analysis through a number of existing models, there is the need to continuously feel the pulse of a brand, from time to time—quarterly, bi-annually or annually—to gain insights on what is changing in how people perceive the brand and how they are reacting to certain brand actions. Usually involving some external consultant or agency help, this can be pivotal to crisis prevention.

Like an example a renowned marketing professional referred to recently on a Twitter Spaces conversation with @fourthcanvas, a prominent bank brand in Nigeria that rebranded pre-2010 and quickly gained renown for its customer service excellence has almost become the direct opposite (in the minds of people, which is the most important place) but it appears the company did not even notice. A brand health tracking progress would have helped to notice the gradual downward trend and inspire necessary actions early in time.

On consistency and “being rigid”

Brand sustainability is mostly viewed through the prism of consistency and adherence, which can sometimes attract the criticism of stiffling creative exploration. However, consistency and exploration are not mutually exclusive but can work hand-in-hand where most of the factors above are put in place, especially the quality of people in the setup. If you wear a pink jean every single day but change your top from time to time, you would both be consistent and “interesting”, right? What matters is to know 1. what doesn’t change, and 2. how the things that change revolve around it without hurting the core (but rather strengthening it).

Openness is a critical ingredient towards ensuring that preserving how a brand is portrayed never becomes more important than doing what’s best for the brand in the long run. Sometimes a succesful rebrand, followed by great sustainability, may still lead up to another rebrand after only a couple of years. Like in the case of Uber rebranding 3 times in 6 years, this is not always an indication of failure but rather more of being true to insights uncovered from continuous evaluation, no matter how inconvenient they are. Uber’s is an extreme example but it helps to make the point.

It is very important to invest the money and time to get a rebrand right, as a project, but it is surely more important to see it for what it truly is—a kickoff rather than the finish line.

(Victor Fatanmi is the Managing Partner at FourthCanvas, a brand strategy and design agency focused on African tech ecosystems).