Growing Your Brand vs Rebranding

Rebranding is more expensive than companies and their marketing teams realize. 

Every year, Marketing teams invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into changing the brand, logo, website, tagline etc. for companies that likely don’t need the change to begin with.

Along the way, political capital is wasted, VPs of Marketing get fired and current brand equity is squandered.

Most importantly, revenue does not go up.

The bigger the company, the more the waste. E.g. A Fortune 500 company doing a rebrand can cost millions of dollars in new marketing collateral, website changes, building signs, retraining of sales teams etc. 

At the same time, smaller companies doing rebrands can waste limited resources on a rebrand that doesn’t meet the ultimate goal of driving growth.

Reasons cited for these brand overhauls include:

-Increased M&A activity and needing to tell a bigger story

-Current branding not matching what the company really does / offers

-Needing to differentiate from competitors

-And much more

While these reasons are valid, there is a painful truth most companies miss: the customer doesn’t care about cosmetic changes.

What the customer cares most about is the real value your company brings. This means, regardless of your brand name, colours, taglines, customers want to know how you will make a real difference in their lives.

So unless it's absolutely necessary (e.g. your brand is actually a detriment to your growth), take the same dollars that would be wasted on a rebrand and invest it into growing your brand.

What this work looks like:

-Educating the market on your brand story and differentiated position

-Creating exceptional content that resonates and generates true engagement

-Ramping up demand generation across all channels from your ideal customers

-Increasing awareness from the broader market so that more prospects are aware of your offering

-Building loyalty from your existing customers by continuing to deliver value

This is the really hard work of building a brand. Anyone can change some logos and colors.