Ask Yourself These Questions for a More Successful Rebrand

It requires much more than a public-facing change in aesthetic and philosophy. The full rebranding playbook—the time-consuming, labor-intensive work that goes beyond brand creation—is less an art than a detail-oriented science.

To devise a winning playbook for brand implementation, you need to start with a strong outline. Here are the questions to ask yourself so you can structure a plan, from the outset, that maximizes investment and puts your entire ecosystem in a position to achieve all of the strategic objectives of the rebrand.

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What’s the problem you’re solving? 

Rebranding is driven by a variety of factors. Multi-siloed organizations spin off various units into their own separate brands. Traditional mergers and acquisitions involving two companies remain a driving force. Other corporations acquire so many disparate businesses that they must reimagine their entire brand architecture just to make sense of it all. More recently, the desire to modernize into a post-pandemic, consumer-focused landscape has inspired a number of major rebrands. 

To begin, you’ll need more than a dash of inspiration, a clever name and a vision for the future of your organization. Along with determining the what and the why behind a new brand, an organization must answer the trickier questions: Where will our new brand appear? How do we make the new brand activate within the organization? Who do we need to involve in the process? When will different assets roll out, and what do we prioritize? Last (but not least), how much will all of this cost, and how do we make everything we do more efficient? 

The answers will look very different from one organization to the next. That’s why implementation must be completely tailored to how an individual organization operates, what it owns and how it would deal with any sort of asset conversion. 

How soon do you want to rebrand? 

Would your organization rather spend $20 million to implement a full rebrand over the span of two years, or $40 million to implement in six months? What about $35 million to do the same two-year rebrand at better quality, consistency and impact? 

These are the kind of necessary questions that must be addressed early in the process and are difficult to answer without a robust frame of reference that independent consultants who specialize in brand implementation can provide. 

More than the typical Madison Avenue creative hub, a firm that specializes in brand implementation is a hands-on partner in making the new brand present wherever and however necessary. These firms can quickly grasp the full effort required for brand change and provide an accurate estimate of time and costs of the rebrand before it spirals out of an organization’s control.

With every stakeholder gathered, a thorough scenario-planning exercise can flesh out every variable to determine which are well-defined, immovable stakes in the ground, and which are variables to be modeled against. Only then can an organization optimize its approach to the rebranding effort by considering multiple approaches to time, prioritization, asset strategy and quality. 

Remember, this is not a theoretical exercise around brand valuation or projected market return. It’s a real, tangible exercise around what an organization does today, how they do it, who they do it with, what they spend on it and what they could gain year over year by simply managing their assets, vendors, resources, processes and technology differently in the future. A heavy upfront investment (in time and money) in this critical first step of the process will pay for itself as the rebranding process unfolds.

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Who will be leading the rebrand?

One thing every rebranding effort has in common: a campaign to raise external awareness of the new brand, logo and philosophy. That’s why advertising and marketing should have a seat at the table from Day 1, even when rebrands originate outside the marketing department, such as with mergers and acquisitions, splits and other large-scale corporate transactions.

Only with a full understanding of the rebrand, corporate strategy and deal structure can they begin to estimate the necessary costs, control the process and outcomes, and adhere to their budget and deadlines. 

The CEO’s endorsement and leadership is a necessary foundation of any successful rebrand, while an organization’s chief marketing officer is a natural leader for tactical change. Successfully transitioning to a new brand means empowering the CMO to build out the strategy, oversee the project and ultimately act as an internal and perhaps external spokesperson for the change.

There will be plenty to oversee. Brand implementation and brand development are parallel-path initiatives. As an organization builds out its new brand elements, it should also be working on building out the project governance model and engaging workgroups in the detailed planning required. As they are developing their launch and advertising and communications strategies, they should be working on all of the preliminary surveys, production and other elements needed to ensure an impactful launch.

Not doing so will not only lead to a more costly and less impactful implementation, it will also leave a lot of opportunities on the table that could have been leveraged. 

Rebranding might be driven by marketing, but the functional side of getting departments to communicate their complexities to other groups needs to go through someone. Marketing will ask and answer the high-level questions throughout the rebranding process, but from an execution standpoint, some things will fall outside of their expertise.

Have you engaged the rest of the organization? 

Involving specific departments within an organization is essential to success in the implementation stage. This should be addressed during the initial scenario planning and modeling stage.

Various aspects of rebranding can be achieved in a host of ways that don’t require a CEO or CMO to inform the entire group that change is imminent—but it does require you to engage all functional areas of the organization to understand the scope of assets they control, the operational cycles that can be leveraged, resource capacity, vendors or agencies, and other factors that will influence planning. No organization rebrands all its products in a short window. 

Legal must walk through the time, costs and logistics of rebranding your business in different states or countries. Information technology must be prepared to update every affected URL and line of code. Facilities and real estate must oversee all changes in signage. A company’s public relations agency, media-buying agency, digital agency—all will have an integral voice in the implementation process. These units will probably be involved multiple times at different stages of the process. Logistically, some units will need more time. 

For example, real estate is a long lead item that requires a broad understanding of its scope of assets. How you might want to effect change is a major cost factor, a large opportunity in many cases, and something that needs to get into motion well before many other aspects due to the activities required. Permitting and other legal requirements might delay implementation regionally or globally.

Some business units—say, facilities maintenance—might seem less connected to the process than others, but even they will need a new ID badge, for example. Even in these lightly impacted areas, strong oversight is needed to ensure the bigger-picture objectives of the rebrand are achieved: investing in the products that make the most impact, minimizing scrap, etc. Everyone in an organization can play at least a small role in achieving these objectives.

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Assessing all the required work

As a rebrand reaches its clearly defined objectives, a few key areas will need to remain in sharp focus: 

1. Detailed inventories of physical and digital branded assets. This isn’t just about finding all things that have a brand on them. This is about understanding the ins and outs of every implication of brand change: What exists, what else is impacted, what is the operational cycle, who will rebrand them, what is their capacity, and what vendors or agencies are involved? 
2. Financial estimates and budget projections. This is a powerful tool that can help the CMO remove all subjectivity and drive the organization to select the right implementation approach by having all facts on the table though the presentation of multiple scenario models. 
3. Project governance structure and plans. What is the right level of centralized control for decentralized execution? What do we want to control, and how does the organization need to be supported in that? How will we control financials, tracking, reporting, approval processes, a help desk, etc.?
4. Integrated planning, dependency and risk-modeling. Every single aspect of agency work, brand development and area of asset conversion all need to be integrated into one single plan—with all risks, dependencies, timing and resources considered to ensure project success. 
5. The logistics of asset conversion. Every area within an organization will need a different level of support in converting its assets. Facilities, for example, may need support to develop technical specifications for signage, do site surveys and recommendation books, manage vendor RFPs and the vendors themselves through prototyping, production, permitting, shipping, installation and post-implementation punch lists. 
6. Opportunities for operational improvement. Perhaps you have a decentralized organization and want to be more centralized. Perhaps you have processes or technologies that need to be addressed as a part of the rebrand. Perhaps you don’t have an agency or vendor standard operating procedure or a way to collect assets and data well—or you need to consolidate agencies or create an in-house agency for the first time. These and many other opportunities present themselves in a rebrand and offer an opportunity to integrate them into your planning and come out the other side simply operating that way. 

This won’t happen in a linear order. Rebranding means having multiple balls in the air at the same time, always. Some depend on other balls to get complete. Organization is as essential as any trait to a rebrand’s success.