When speaking to rebranding, Mr. Clive sums it up perfectly. Your competitors come in fresh and hot (e.g., Research in Motion rebranding to simply Blackberry), a crisis gives your brand a questionable reputation (e.g., Kentucky Fried Chicken changing its name to KFC) or you’ve reached a milestone year and it is simply time to update your brand to convey a more mature look and feel (e.g., AirBnB refreshing after six years of using a temporary logo because of their rapid growth) – no matter the catalyst, refreshing or altogether rebranding your business is a huge undertaking that could significantly help or hurt the company’s bottom line.

AR|PR // 1To learn what ARPR can do for your business, visit www.arpr.com.

RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

The 8 Steps To Rebranding Your Biz

The world is fast changing and until you learn to adapt and adjust to stand out from the masses, you will fade into oblivion.

- Bernard Kelvin Clive, author of REBRAND

THEN

NOW

ARPR // 2RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

If you are in business long enough, rebranding or refreshing your brand is inevitable. So, the million-dollar question is, how do we make sure we’re one of the rebranding success stories? Are the companies who succeed simply lucky? Furthermore, did they hire a magician? Or, did they have the right strategy and team in place?

These are a couple of the questions that the ARPR senior leadership team asked ourselves as we began our own brand refresh. On the heels of our fifth birthday, we set out to create something that would appropriately describe who we had become and where we were going, versus who we had been. We didn’t want to be like the many companies out there that get lost in the hustle and ignore their own brands’ creative look, feel and assets, while creating just that for our clients. We wanted to eat our own dog food – in practicing our craft on ourselves, as well as for our clients.

In this white paper, we’ll utilize our key findings to help anyone, for whatever reason, reset, refresh and repeat. Once you are done reading, you’ll have what you need to ensure you have a smooth, streamlined and “sexy” brand (re)launch.

OUR EVOLUTION

2012 2013 2017

There are undoubtedly an unending list of questions you can ask yourself, your team, your clients and your prospects when beginning to rebrand, but there is such a thing as a happy medium here. Too many questions, and you will overthink every decision. Too few, and you may head in the completely wrong direction.

Below are the top five questions, collected by our team via a combination of research and experience, that you should ask yourself and your executive team before you even get started.

ARPR // 3RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

phase one RESET STEP ONE Answer the BIG Questions

Why?? What brought us here today to have this discussion about rebranding/refreshing? What problems are we attempting to solve? What is it about our current branding that is not helping us reach our business goals/objectives? How much brand equity do we have among our target audiences? If we completely renamed and rebranded today, how much would that really hurt awareness and ultimately, sales? Has our customer profile changed? What are our current personas vs. what they were 3-5 years ago? Have they shifted? Does our brand reflect who we’ve become? Who we aspire to be?It’s always important to not only think about the present, but the future. You certainly don’t want to rebrand every few years, it’s a time consuming and fairly costly process.

1

2

3

4

5

Now that you have the BIG questions answered, you’ve got to look even deeper and figure out what it all means. Then, make the big decision of how to proceed.

Bringing c-suite decision makers to the table along with representatives from each business unit will help to give a truly cohesive perspective. We recommend a pow-wow that includes these members sitting around the table and staring at whiteboard for a few hours. It may sound horrible, but forcing your team to have these sometimes difficult discussions will help to amalgamate the answers to the aforementioned questions.

Sometimes the final answer may be that you don’t need to rebrand, or even refresh. Other times, it may be that you need more data in order to make an educated and strategic decision. And then other times, it may be crystal clear. If it is the latter, proceed with the next part of the RESET section. If not, do not pass go, do not collect $100 and go back to step 1.

ARPR // 4RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

phase one RESET STEP TWO The Introspection

You are entirely too close to who you are as a company, as you should be. You need someone to help you through this process, which can sometimes lead to tears :) It’s ok, we won’t judge because change is hard. Hiring an agency to help doesn’t mean you aren’t in control. Below are a few considerations when choosing an agency that even the American Marketing Association approves of:

Answering these questions + understanding how the agency works, communicates and bills can all help you make the right choice.

ARPR // 5RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

phase one RESET STEP THREE The Unbiased Third Party

Have they done this before? Do they offer the depth in their team to execute the project?

Do they have relevant industry expertise? Are they experts in your industry? Have they worked in your industry at all? In order to be successful, the agency will have to have a good understanding of industry nuances to get it right.

Do your definitions of creativity jive? Are you inspired and impressed looking at their website? Case studies? Concepts in their pitch? If the answer to any of these is no, you may need to press further or continue your search.

Is it a cultural fit? Does the team share similar values and seem easy to work with?

1

2

3

4

Your vision includes EVERYTHING you need to provide the third-party agency/designer to get the job done. The biggest and most important piece of this is the explanation of who you are as a company – your company’s mission, its vision, its descriptor, its boilerplate, its tone, its voice – basically, what is your brand’s message?

If you don’t have this, you have nothing. This is step 0.1. You’ll need to first complete a total messaging session, tweak or completely overhaul the above, then begin this process at step 1. If you do have this, and you feel confident that it accurately describes who you are now and who you want to be in five years (refer to questions above in reset section), then you’ll also need to collect the following to hand over to the chosen agency:

This part of the process may seem esoteric (but remember, that is why it is important to pick the right agency fit from the start!) or even too touchy/feely/fluffy. If it does, that’s a good sign. Your brand look/feel/tone/message should evoke emotions and encourage a positive reaction from your target audience.

ARPR // 6RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

phase two REFRESH STEP FOUR Your Vision

Examples of brands you love/hate and the reasons why. Anecdotes and testimonials from both employees and, when applicable, clients.

Imagery. What colors, symbols, shapes inspire you and collectively explain who you are as a company. This could be anything. We’ve had clients tell us their company was a converse sneaker! We’ve also had companies say they were a blue square. There’s no wrong answer!

1

2

3

No, I don’t mean your company’s overarching mission. I mean you, and the other employees included in the rebranding efforts. You all have a mission. Your role in the process is to now be as critical as you can - think about perceptions that your clients, customers and partners will have. Your team’s buy-in is VERY important (more on that in a sec). But most importantly, is YOU. At the end of the day, after reading countless explanations of color changes and logo shapes and sizes, you will have to come to a decision, and hopefully it doesn’t take months. After all, time is money in this instance.

Chances are, if you were chosen to lead up this initiative, you have had some experience doing this before. Or, your bosses have some serious trust in you (congrats!). Or, you are the CEO of a small company and you have to go it alone (you can do it!). Regardless, there are MANY, MANY helpful articles, books, magazines and toolkits that go beyond this white paper. One of them is this HubSpot Essential Guide to Branding Your Company Toolkit.

ARPR // 7RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

phase two REFRESH STEP FIVE Your Mission

There are going to be quite a few things you need to do. First up, you need to decide how you will unveil your new masterpiece. First and foremost, you’ve GOT to get the buy-in of your employees and stakeholders. Why? Colin Mitchell said it best in this Harvard Business Review article when he said, “we’ve found that when people care about and believe in the brand, they’re motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company increases. Employees are unified and inspired by a common sense of purpose and identity.”

Bottom Line, you can’t have a successful brand relaunch without first getting your internal team stoked. Whether that is an internal launch party or simply new team swag, this buy-in is pivotal to the rebrand’s success. Once that it accomplished, you can then move on to unveiling to the world.

There are traditionally 2-3 types of approaches to unveiling your brand externally. It’s important to figure out the best approach that works for your company, fits in your budget and makes the biggest impact on your target audience approach.

• FIRST, THERE IS THE MOST COMMON ROLL-OUT: THE BIG REVEAL. This is when the company rolls out the entire rebrand at once – from soup to nuts – website to letterhead, PowerPoint templates to business cards. Doing this requires months of planning, tight deadlines and a LOT of internal communication. For some bigger brands and larger organizations, ripping the Band-Aid off like this is completely necessary in order to ensure the entire company is on-brand and on board.

• SECOND, THERE IS THE PHASED ROLL-OUT. This is a systematic approach where the most critical elements that are seen day-to-day by external audiences like websites and email signatures are “launched” alongside a rebranding announcement, and other deliverables, like internal memos and thank you cards are added in secondary and tertiary phases. What is important to remember is that this approach is also very systematic, and if done correctly and rolled out by each deadline, can also be successful. The fact that you didn’t have an all-at-once rebrand may go unnoticed by clients, customers, recruits, etc. This approach is most common among SMBs – it’s more cost-efficient, and it is also easier to communicate the rolling deadlines to a smaller, more cohesive team.

• LAST (AND IN OUR OPINION) AND CERTAINLY LEAST, IS THE GRADUAL ROLLOUT APPROACH. This approach is more laissez faire than what we defined as a phased approach, having more loosely held deadlines and not necessarily rolling out all major customer-facing branding materials revised at once. This approach, while the cheapest, is often perceived as very sloppy and can do way more harm than good.

ARPR // 8

phase two REFRESH STEP SIX Before you get those final new logos and color palette

ARPR // 9RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

phase three REPEAT

What should you expect and negotiate before the design process starts? Revisions! An average amount of revision cycles ranges, but we typically experience 3-4 rounds with our clients, and even with our recent ARPR brand refresh. Anything over that number could mean that you didn’t follow all of the guidelines in Steps 1 & 2, and you may need to go back and tweak a few things to get to where you want to be.

Leading a rebranding isn’t easy (heavy is the head that wears the crown, right?) It’s important to remember that your job isn’t to please everyone, but remind them that you are here to reach a collective goal. However, if you did your due diligence and preparation in the aforementioned steps, you undoubtedly have a great new logo and color palette. Eventually, it may come down to a gut check and knowing when it is time to call it a game.

While a new logo and color palette keep your brand fresh, you must always be thinking about “breaking it.” As ARPR friend and mentor Raj Choudhury, president of BirghtWave says, the key to successful organizations is how quickly that organization consistently breaks things. It’s obvious that Raj isn’t meaning literally break the office printer, but rather, proverbially set out to break the molds and processes that have been created over time at any company. Why? To constantly make them BETTER!!!

Now, we’re not saying that that you need to rebrand every couple of years. NO. Not at all! But revisiting the rebranding exercise is something you SHOULD be doing to get a temperature check on not just the look and feel of the brand, but the overarching success of it. As the quote at the beginning of this white paper states, if you can’t adapt and evolve, you won’t survive!

STEP SEVEN How many revision rounds is too many?

STEP EIGHT You’re never really done.

ARPR is a results-driven public relations and integrated communications agency for technology leaders. As one of the nation’s fastest growing technology PR firms, ARPR was named the 2016 National Tech Public Relations Agency of the Year by Bulldog Reporter and a 2016 TOP Places to Work in PR by PR News. With a passion for telling technology and entrepreneurial stories, ARPR cultivates strategic partnerships with its cybersecurity, mission critical, health IT, mobility and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) clients. From high-growth startups to publicly traded enterprises, ARPR helps companies within these industries cut through the noise and clutter to #MakeNews and #DriveLeads.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE AWARD-WINNING AGENCY, VISIT OUR OFFICES IN

ATLANTA, NEW ORLEANS AND SAN FRANCISCO AND ONLINE AT ARPR.COM AND @AR__PR.

RESET, REFRESH, REPEAT

The 8 Steps To Rebranding Your Biz