What Your Company May Win or Lose By REBRANDING

Every company passes through tough situations as well as success, and the best thing to do is to work on the internal issues that cause the situation not to change colors. When can rebranding be an answer to your company? What would your company lose or win in the rebranding process? Let’s know.

What is rebranding?

Rebranding is changing your brand identity, including logo, color palette, fonts, product packaging, and designs. Moreover, the brand’s tone of voice, message, mission, vision, values, and sometimes even the scale of the target audience. Some rebranding processes include all that; others change part of that.

What do you lose when you make a rebrand?

The recognition

As a consequence of Twitter rebranding, it took us some time as marketers to spell it X instead of Twitter, but unfortunately, us and everybody else is still calling the posts Tweets. We’re tweeting on X, and it’s still confusing. There are plenty of remnants of the original brand name, including the platform’s web domain, which is still twitter.com—even the new domain x.com redirects to the original link.

Twitter transformation to X.com

In the best scenario, your audience will be confused for some time, then recognize the changes, and continue consuming as they used to; never mind losing a fraction of the audience scale that didn’t like the changes and didn’t feel represented by, which has happened with X.com.

In another scenario, part of your audience will take the chance to try some alternatives. And in the worst case scenario, you may end up with a complete unrecognition and keep a fraction of your audience who will search to know what happened, realize the changes have occurred, and continue to be loyal.

Furthermore, the inevitable loss will be that scale of potential audience that intended to use your products/services, and suddenly they no longer see your brand in the market.

Sales

If you’re not careful enough with the rebranding, know exactly your goals, and study the situation well, you may end up with the sales rates you had when you first launched your brand.

Evolving sales for an emerging brand can take some time, in which most brands spend paying higher costs than earning profit. By rebranding, you’ll definitely have a sales drop; if you were too cautious, the sales will remain the same with no going-up curves for a while because your POTENTIAL customers, who barely remember your original logo, do see it in the market anymore.

Though, the expected sales drop can be controlled depending on how much you’ve studied the situation, how keen you were on your audience, the rebranding strategy you’ve chosen, and the steps you’ve successfully and carefully taken.

Marketing efforts

A B rebranding, means losing the brand awareness campaigns you went through. Rebranding is actually as if a new competitor tries to jump on your brand reputation, stimulate your brand, and take a share of your market; if you already built a solid trust among your audience, that competitor (your rebranding) may take a small share of your audience.

Add to this, the annual budget you’ve already spent on marketing, the time and efforts your marketing team spent, and the time and effort they will have to spend on rebranding.

Your brand positioning

In a market full of alternatives, rebranding may cause you to lose the positioning you have worked on so hard. If your company possesses the second biggest market share, you’ll spend a while not even close to competing for the position you had. If your rebranding strategy doesn’t consider keeping your current audience, you will spend some time getting acknowledged by quality, prices, distribution, and the credibility you’re re-building.

Loyal audience

Some brands don’t intend to lose their audience, and they don’t, yet they get confused for a while. It’s why some brands follow a certain careful strategy, by adding the new logo side by side to the old one (one of them is smaller than the other), and spend a few months this way until the audience recognizes there will be a change in logo and keeps it loyal until then.

Some other careful brands don’t move very far from the old logo, and even if they’re looking for a huge change in visual identity, they change it in phases, taking one part of the change every couple of years.

Radio Shack logo

Nevertheless, you can always change your brand strategy instead of making a rebranding process. You can also change the visual brand identity, but announce so before launching. There’s multiple alternatives for rebranding to study and take on the most proper one for your company.

Here’s 5 things to win by rebranding … when it’s done right

A better representation for your company

“In most people’s minds, we are still a successful mobile phone brand, but this is not what Nokia is about,” Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark told Bloomberg. “We want to launch a new brand that is focusing very much on the networks and industrial digitalization, which is a completely different thing from the legacy mobile phones.”.

Nokia new logo

A company that started selling smartphones, then a sales boom happened to a side offered software, may need rebranding. A company that grew an unexpected audience that later occupied the biggest scale of its target may need rebranding to represent them better. A company that had a 3D outdated logo and should transform into a flat one may need rebranding.

Example: The South Korean consumer technology brand LG made quite a few changes to its brand in 2023. The biggest change is the transition from its 3D logo to the 2D flat logo design.

lg color scheme (photo via dwglogo.com)

Also, a company that suffers a major problem with distracting colors and confusing fonts will need rebranding. A company that enters a new market, while the current identity may be offensive for the audience culture, will definitely need rebranding.

A more relevant branding

Many companies have been keeping their customers for years and years; now their customers have become millennials, and they need a rebranding to catch up on the same audience scale and go along with their new interests.

Some other brands may need to get a younger audience, as their products and services are designed for younger ages, yet the brand’s original logo, visual identity, and narrative are out of style or outdated. And in this case, rebranding revives the old brand and updates its aesthetic with a new message.

A higher potential customers

It happens that a business that targets a high-income audience attracts middle-income ones, or a business that targets a middle-income audience attracts a high-income audience who are more interested in its products, and this is what happened with IKEA.

If there’s a higher potential audience interested in your products, you can absolutely consider rebranding, tapping into a new audience that may uplift your business entirely.

A better recognized identity

A lot of brands had to perform rebranding to surf better on the wave of social media and digital platforms. The success criteria of a catchy logo, a non-popular brand name, and a strong slogan rapidly changed into culturalized, simple, single catchy color, a message that represents the company value, and fit-all-digital platforms. The presence on the digital platforms required a necessary partial rebranding for every business.

Keeping audience informed of major internal changes

Such as merging. A good example is a market leader business in Qatar originally known as Qtel, rebranded to Ooredoo in 2013 after acquiring a majority stake in Kuwait’s Wataniya Telecom, among other regional telecoms.

The rebranding under the name Ooredoo was aimed at unifying its various acquisitions across the Gulf region and beyond under one global brand. This strategy helped Ooredoo enhance its brand visibility and market presence across its operational markets, including Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Tunisia.

Qtel rebrands as ooredoo in Qatar (photo via thenewstribe.io)

Rebranding is almost like starting a new company. Remember the trials you’ve been through, the replanning, the marketing strategies you had to change every once in a while to reach a better target audience, the ad budget, and the time you spent with high costs and low profits until you finally won a fair profit margin.

Rebranding is a big challenge for companies; you just have to get a professional partner to tell you when to do it and how to do it. Contact Rosella.

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