If you’re familiar with the term “brand implementation,” we’ll venture that you’ve been around the brand change block. BrandActive lends a steady, strategic hand to medium and large-sized companies undergoing brand change. This article is for marketing executives seeking guidance on how to assign ownership for brand change tasks among internal staff and external partners.
What You Need to Do When A Rebranding Becomes Necessary
We love that you’re a proud and fiercely protective shepherd of your brand. When a rebranding becomes necessary through a change in business focus, or a merger or acquisition, it’s a change involving both risk and opportunity. You know that landing on a new name or logo is just the beginning, and that the Herculean task of physically rebranding all your existing assets is where the rubber hits the proverbial road. The brand change buck stops with you, and the pressure is on. In a recent Forbes article on rebranding, Steve Blue of Miller Ingenuity was quoted as saying, “One thing is certain: execute poorly and suffer extreme consequences. There is simply no rebranding effort where the stakes are not extraordinarily high and the margin for error is slim at best.”
We get it. Even if you’ve got a dedicated team and a multi-million dollar budget, schedules will be tight and your task list intimidating. After 15 years of experience with corporate brand implementation, we’re confident that the winning formula for a smooth brand transition is smart utilization of ‘comparative advantage’.
The Comparative Advantage
We define comparative advantage here as “all parties benefit by contributing their unique expertise for the best possible outcome.” For example, you outsource the development of your new brand identity—one of the three pillars of corporate rebranding—when you don’t have in-house branding strategists. You may outsource public relations for the same reason. Outsourcing the brand implementation role to BrandActive allows you to own the process internally while we help you ask the right questions, communicate what’s needed internally, and more.
As CMO or VP of Marketing or Corporate Communications, your institutional knowledge and influence with the C-Suite will marshall the momentum needed to drive things forward. BrandActive’s comparative advantage kicks in to support you in these ways and more:
- We advise you of the risks, pitfalls, and cost savings we’ve experienced through managing hundreds of brand transitions
- We help you plan the best launch approach, using criteria such as cost/timing/quality tradeoffs
- We provide industry-specific branded asset lists to ensure you don’t overlook anything, while helping you prioritize your branded assets for transition based on cost and impact
- We’ll help you create a savvy asset replacement strategy that can literally save you millions of dollars
- We focus on detailed ‘scenario planning’ to provide cost estimates and schedules for the development of your internal budgets, and to illustrate the quality, impact and budget implications of various phased launch approaches
- We keep a focus on your future brand management needs, to maximize brand impact and minimize future costs
- We perform vendor training (as needed) for proper enforcement of your brand guidelines and standards
Conclusion
Working together, the three pillars of corporate rebranding function as a smartly-resourced, formidable team. Building a top-notch team of internal and external brand change champions will help you catch up and stay at least one step ahead, until the day your new brand is revealed to the world.
How you implement your brand is just as important as what you implement. Learn more about how our team takes care of the complexities and interdependencies of your new brand’s implementation in this two-minute video.
