Three Credentials To Look For When Selecting A Rebranding Firm

Rebranding is no small task. It is like climbing to the mountaintop. When a company or organization steps into the belief that rebranding might be a strategic option to address their growth headwinds, they need a partner who can guide them carefully to the peak. They need a sherpa, a rebranding specialist firm well experienced in brand transformation process.

Few people in the corporate environment have participated, let alone led, a rebranding effort. It is a path filled with many dangerous crevasses, potential wrong turns and risky shortcuts that can have devastating negative effects. Company leaders most frequently turn to their current marketing or advertising agency for guidance, which may be their first wrong turn. Rebranding Experts was established and purposefully designed to rebrand organizations successfully. We designed a methodology and built the capability set to fully meet the needs of such an important undertaking.

So, as you review potential partners to lead your rebranding effort, ask them these three questions to see if they have the chops to get the work done:

Is Rebranding a Side Job or Their Core Competency?

Many traditional marketing firms make their bread and butter on ongoing campaign creation and execution for clients, usually timed to key sales periods. The brand is already set, they are just delivering it to the marketplace. Taking on a full rebranding assignment might be stepping outside their comfort zone, especially if they created the original brand. Sure, a rebranding presents an intellectual challenge to the agency team but not one that should come at the cost to the client. Rather, you want a rebranding firm who has been down this road may times. One who has experienced the wide-ranging breadth of challenges that can emerge and has experiences to draw upon in their counsel.

Do They View Rebranding As a Marketing Strategy or More?

Rebranding is brand-led business transformation. It is not simply a marketing strategy to change a name, a logo, and refreshen advertising. A rebrand is standing up an entirely new brand, a new customer brand experience that leans more decisively into your key differentiators, and then ensuring that the organization is ready to deliver it consistently. We believe that rebranding is not a marketing strategy, but an enterprise-wide strategic growth accelerator, a process of creating a new forward-facing business ready to seize future opportunities. If your firm goes right to the logo or the identity design application of your rebrand, they’re setting you up for failure.

Does The Agency Have the Broader Set of Capabilities Necessary to Lead You Through the End-to-End Rebranding Process?

Creating a new logo, website and even a new name, are the creative part of a rebranding, which in total demands strategy, creative and executional competencies. Truly leading you through a rebranding takes such skills as: leadership coaching (not selling them but guiding their leadership), change management as rebranding is a comprehensive change effort for the organization), expertise in employee engagement, project management to execute against an implementation timeline, communications expertise to all stakeholders, and the know-how to work in advance to mitigate any crisis that a rebranding can produce. These are capabilities that a marketing or advertising firm does develop or maintain as they are infrequently used.