To rebrand or not to rebrand?

How finding your brand’s North Star can undoubtedly help guide decision-making.

B2B rebranding strategy

There has never been a more pertinent time to take stock and look at how your overall brand is performing. Is it still having the same impact? You might be in need of a rebrand or just a refresh of your messaging…but how do you know for sure?

According to a report by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, short-term sales messages are generally irrelevant to 95% of your audience at any given time. Basically, brand building in B2B is vital to long-term growth!

Making the right decisions regarding your brand equity and awareness will therefore ultimately lead to your business being front of mind at the right time.

Our guide will show you how to find your brand’s North Star, a single point of reference on which to base all decision making and align stakeholders, subsequently preparing your business for the long term.

Download our guide

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

– Henry Ford

What this guide explores

In this guide, we focus on finding your brand’s overall ‘North Star’ or brand positioning. This therefore acts as a highly accurate point of reference on which to base all communications decisions and helping improve the accuracy of your marketing efforts across the board, to generate more leads.

Introduction: Why your brand proposition is so important.
Chapter one: Convince the leadership team.
Chapter two: Get out of the starting blocks.
Chapter three: Provide the right stimulus for decision-making.
Chapter four: Define your brand positioning.
Conclusion: Welcome to your North Star.

Reasons to rebrand

Outdated brand

Perhaps it’s just as simple as your brand feeling tired and outdated, your logo designed a lifetime ago and you have outgrown it. If you feel this way, you can guarantee your customers will feel the same!

Repositioning

Businesses that go through a repositioning exercise (see our guide) are often doing so as the business offer has changed. They want to reach new audiences or they simply want to be more appealing to their current audiences. With this change comes a need to review your brand…. Does it stack up with your new direction?

Greater stand out

Your competition are reviewing their brand on a constant basis. It’s important to keep up with these changes in the market to make sure you are not left behind.

Merger or acquisition

Of course a merger or acquisition can be a driver for a rebrand, incorporating the parent brand for consistency and market visibility. This is often accompanied by an internal comms strategy to ensure brand and culture are aligned.

Change perceptions

A rebrand can be driven by a need to tackle a bad reputation or perhaps your business is perceived as too small or not having the international reach your customers are looking for. In changing perceptions, it’s important that the rebrand is driven by robust audience research.

Brand consistency

Often, companies begin with a logo designed in-house and over time, build a suite of assets, from the website to signage and brochureware. Building the brand gradually this way means it can become inconsistent and poorly executed and the addition of sub-brands can compound this. This can be a simple exercise of brand consolidation – refreshing the core brand identity and rolling this out across all assets or it could be time for a brand overhaul.