15 Ways Rebranding Can Bring Unexpected Opportunity For Your Company

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Jim Heininger's story originally appeared in Forbes.

Rebranding an organization—establishing an entirely new customer promise, visual identity and name—demands significant effort. The intended outcome is a revitalized, more customer-centric brand that better differentiates your company from competitors and furthers that emotional bond with customers. However, many companies that embark on this journey fail to grasp the full extent of the additional opportunities that a strategic pivot can truly deliver.

Sending such a clear and ambitious signal to customers and competitors, and showcasing your commitment to creating a better future, is a rarity.

As a brand-led growth transformation, rebranding provides the rationale to make changes crucial to your future business success. It presents a unified strategic "why" for cleaning up, letting go and moving forward.

Through our work with companies across all industries and sizes, we witness firsthand how rebranding can bring an abundance of opportunities, some of which, when pursued independently, could be more disruptive and require significant change management to ensure success. However, by packaging them as critical elements of a rebranding effort, their contributions compound, leading to exponential growth.

Here are 15 unexpected ways rebranding can bring growth-focused opportunities for your company:

• Revive underdeveloped brands: Rebranding can rescue underdeveloped or hastily developed brands by allowing a thoughtful brand development process to craft a robust brand packed with meaning and possibility. It corrects everything that is wrong with your current brand and sets you on a path for more effective brand marketing.

• Shed outdated product lines or services: Rebranding provides a positive reason to shed old product lines or services that no longer fit the new strategic direction and brand.

• Accelerate important initiatives: Rebranding provides the rationale to ramp up initiatives such as sustainability, purpose-driven culture or strategic philanthropy.

• Foster cross-functional cooperation: Rebranding requires leaders to come together to develop a collectively beneficial brand that drives enterprise-wide success, fostering unique cross-functional cooperation that can continue once this exercise is completed.

• Strengthen employer branding: A rebrand ties all the important elements of an effective employer brand together, from recruiting to onboarding and company culture, enhancing the overall customer experience promise.

• Fortify culture to deliver the goods: During rebranding, you need to strengthen and align your company culture behind delivering on that new customer promise. New on-brand behaviors will allow you to let go of old culture paradigms holding you back while creating a customer-centric, brand-focused culture that will drive results.

• Revitalize customer bond: Rebranding gives companies a fresh new story to tell customers, inspiring reengagement and energizing relationships.

• Foster sales and marketing collaboration: Rebranding necessitates sales and marketing teams to work together collaboratively, a rare occurrence in some companies, leading to a more rewarding and fruitful partnership.

• Improve leadership support: Leadership must carry the flag in a rebranding, actively playing supportive roles to make the transformation successful. It's a chance for them to demonstrate and grow their leadership skills and further their connection with employees.

• Refresh branded assets and collateral: Rebranding provides an opportunity to update and declutter company branded assets and collateral, resulting in significant savings. Clean house of materials that are no longer needed and better organize updates on digital management platforms for easier employee access.

• Enhance customer data: Communicating name changes and new purposes requires reliable and complete CRM data for effective future communications. Most companies use this opportunity to update and enhance their customer data to start off the new brand on the right foot.

• Modernize digital interface: Rebranding often involves designing a new website that addresses compounding problems with legacy systems, improving the customer experience and enabling better demand generation.

• Strengthen change muscles: Wrapped around an enterprise-wide strategic repositioning, change initiatives tend to make more sense to employees, facilitating their engagement. As you strengthen these muscles through the rebranding workout, you'll be in fitter shape to tackle future change.

• Create brand ambassadors: Rebranding offers a chance to overhaul the corporate brand, requiring training for employees on what the brand stands for and how to embody it. Better informed and inspired employees are better advocates.

• Toughen crisis management ability: Preparing for resistance to change and potential blowback from internal or external stakeholders sharpens your ability to navigate future business challenges and crises more effectively.

In essence, rebranding is akin to creating a startup within a mature business operation—an opportunity to start anew, armed with the insights of years of experience. Who wouldn't want an opportunity like that?