Do you brush your teeth twice and day and floss on a regular basis? Do you visit the dentist and hygienist every six months? If the answer is yes and you are an entrepreneur or small business enterprise than making sure that the health and wellbeing of your brand is a little bit like taking care of your teeth. Just like teeth, brands age and mature and need to be maintained to ensure robustness.
Keeping your brand fresh, focused and current goes hand in hand with creating a growing and successful business. A good brand stands the test of time, it doesn’t need to be updated on a yearly basis but ideally overhauled every five years by an expert to ensure that it still relates to your mission, goals and values. Reviewing your logo, colours, website, tone of voice, style of writing, product and service offering also forms part of your brand review. If you are unsure as to whether your brand needs updating ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s changed in your business, industry and market?
- Do you have new products, services or people?
- Are you serving new markets?
- Are your clients asking for different things or variations on what you are providing?
- Does the outside world realise you have changed?
Once you know the answers to the above consider carrying out some research; speak to your clients, after all, they are the ultimate test. Once you have gathered this information work with a specialist and plan your rebrand. Like all projects they need a plan, objectives, budgets, timeframes and someone to navigate the way forward to achieve a successful outcome.
One of the hardest things to do when rebranding is to let go of the history. The approach you took and methodologies employed may no longer be relevant in the new world you are creating. It can be hard to let go because there is a natural emotional attachment to those methods which made your business successful. You need to recognise them for what they provided your business at the time but possibly now no longer serve you well.
Finally, it is really important that everyone understands why you are rebranding, the story that supports the rebrand and how it will help your clients as well as your business. If you have employees you need to communicate the new world to them so that they can become aligned and engaged. Your customers, partners, the press and the industry also need to understand the rebrand.
