Rebranding Requires A New Customer Experience

At its core, rebranding is the redesign of your customer promise and the customer experience, making it more relevant and differentiating to drive growth. But evolving from your current brand experience to a new invigorated one, requires careful planning, long before your rebrand is ever announced.

An important step as we rebrand organizations is to purposefully design a new experience for both current and future customers. Through a Customer Experience Journey Mapping Workshop, focusing on the newly defined brand essence and personality, we proactively create a purposeful and planned Customer Experience that most effectively delights customers and delivers a memorable and loyalty building experience consistent with those brand ideals. Workshop participants representing all departments of the company jointly identify, brainstorm and map out each customer touchpoint along the new end-to-end experience path. Touchpoints can include everything from marketing efforts, a website visit and order, call center response, any in-person or retail visit, packaging and delivery, follow-up confirmation of your order, and long-term brand interactions. The Roadmap process quickly elevates those current brand equities we possess that will be carried forward to the new brand and what are the new touchpoints that need to invented and carefully constructed to create a seamless experience. Then your customer service, brand and operations teams need go to work putting in place all those interconnected touch points, identify data capture and assessment needs.

For example, we worked recently with an electronics business that had successfully built a strong B2B client base as a third-party service provider. The growth opportunity was for the business to expand that service into the consumer market. This meant appealing to and developing meaningful relationships with millions of individual consumers versus a handful of B2B clients. The customer experience will all be online with a package sent to their home. We pulled together representatives of all departments within the organization and mapped out the current B2B customer experience. We identified how that experience should evolve to illustrate the new brand’s promise and character, as well as what new experiences might be necessary to demonstrate the difference. Then we led a blue sky strategizing session to outline the purchase path that new individual consumers would travel to first be introduced to the company, conduct business with us and longer term maintain a relationship for repeat purchase. The map outlined new operations procedures and technology interdependencies necessary to serve this new market, items such as website requirements, customer service tone and vehicles and packaging more friendly to individual consumers.

For the rebranding of a senior care provider we needed to create a signature customer experience moment that would be noticeable illustration of the new brand and contribute to a stronger relationship. The senior care provider had repositioned as being more mindful of the total patient experience and working to ensure that all elements of care were well orchestrated. If this case it was as simple as creating a moment of truth where caregivers would say “is there anything else I can do for you while I’m here?”

Even simple changes like this require larger big planning as they might run into paradigms. The challenge was to train staff to deliver this moment of truth with effective time management, how to use resources at their disposal and tracking how that simple question impacted the overall client experience.

When planning your rebrand be sure to allocate sufficient resources (time and dollars) to remake the customer experience to deliver the differentiating elements of your new brand.