Refreshing your company brand is sometimes necessary. Companies can drift out of the spotlight and become obsolete if the brand is not kept current. But companies refreshing their brands must realize that there’s more to it than uploading a new logo or changing the website. Here’s how to maximize the effectiveness of a brand facelift:
Enact Company-Wide Changes
No matter what changes you make to your brand, make sure that the company can follow through. Don’t emphasize your company’s emphasis on customer service if you aren’t going to dedicate the resources to presenting a noticeably improved customer service experience. Don’t promise reliability unless you’ve ensured that your product is as reliable as it can be. If you can’t back your new claims up with performances, your brand facelift will quickly fail.
This means that your entire company, not just the marketing sector, will have to undergo changes. Take advantage of the brand change to figure out what should be done to improve the company as a whole, and build those changes into your new brand.
Train Brand Champions
Implementing company-wide changes is not easy. Forcing employees to make major alterations to how they do their jobs will be met with skepticism at best, and near-mutiny at worse. Instead, train a worker or two per department to be “brand champions.” Your brand champions will be trained in your new brand objectives, including how and why they are being implemented. They will then work to encourage and enable those in their department to follow through with the new branding.
It is unlikely that you will get everyone in your company immediately on board with a brand change. But by having a few people on your side in every department, you should be able to make the changes as smoothly as possible.
Involve Your Customers
Your customers probably have ideas of what kinds of changes they want to see from your brand. If you have the ability to reach out to them for feedback, do so! It will bring more attention to your rebranding efforts, as well as positioning your company to be one that cares about what its customers think. Additionally, customers often have ideas or perspectives that companies have not considered. If you’re going to put all the effort into changing your brand, make sure that you have as many of those ideas and perspectives as possible, so you can change it in the most positive possible way.
John Partilla, CEO of Screenvision, is a marketing industry executive with more than thirty years of experience. He’s held executive positions at numerous institutions after graduating from the University of Delaware with a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration, as well as earning an MBA from Columbia Business School. Please visit http://JohnPartilla.net, http://JohnPartillaNYC.com, and http://JohnPartillaMedia.com to learn more.