How Rebranding Can Help Your Sales

Just like people, businesses must learn to adapt as their surrounding environments change often times this means making a choice between remaining stagnant or rebranding to stay relevant.

rebranding to stay relevant

The business world is in constant motion: customers demand changes, new competitors come, technologies improve, and even the state rules and regulations are rewritten all the time. The market transforms itself noticeably every couple of years, so every company’s position has to be re-evaluate according to these changes. Surely, this complicates things but brings new opportunities at the same time.

Unfortunately, companies that are too static simply cannot estimate the opportunities they miss; while others use rebranding to benefit from changes and to present a new, more modern image of the company to its customers, partners and investors.

The Component of a Brand

What is a brand?

First of all, it’s the history of your business, your target audience, the quality of your goods, and their pricing – simply put, a brand is everything that distinguishes you among competitors. A perfectly presented history can help your buyers to see why your business really is the best.

As for the pricing and the target audience, they both form basing on the quality of the products. Let’s take two restaurants placed on a same street as an example: if the first one positions itself as an expensive place meant for the “best people” and the second one positions itself as inexpensive diner, their audiences would probably never intersect.

If you want to distinguish your brand from millions of others, you have to create a stable emotional relationship between the customers and your business. The era of brands has already come, so make sure your brand is strong enough to compete. Otherwise, think about rebranding.

Types of Rebranding

Most businesses that aren’t satisfied with their public image have to try rebranding, which can be either proactive or reactive. The first one intends to put your brand ahead of others and the second one works with things that have happened already.

  • Proactive rebranding is used when a company plans to expand, to start new line of products, to enter new market or to work with new target audience.
  • Reactive rebranding may be caused by the merge and absorption of companies, the emergence of new strong competitors, the aging of brands or even by different events that blacken company’s reputation.

If you doubt that your company needs rebranding, evaluate its current condition. This means truly understanding how ‘others’ view your brand. To find this out, you have to conduct various surveys and studies:

  • learn about the associations of your customers;
  • find out the advantages and disadvantages of your company;
  • find out whether the image of your brand corresponds with its perception;
  • find your company’s weak points by comparing it with competitors;

It is also important to become familiar with the competitors’ strategies. Which brands among them are the most successful and what are their main tactics? What features of your brand can you use to win the competition?

The creation of rebranding strategy is similar to the creation of a brand from scratch. This strategy should include a vision of the target audience, information about the quality of goods and services, values, as well as pricing and assortment policy.

You have to understand what you need to change in order to make this work more successfully and efficiently. If the brand’s image creates negative associations, if it’s outdated or not unique, you’ll definitely have to change brand’s positioning completely.

If your brand already has some positive associations, that’s great! Now, all you have to do is figure out how to capitalize on these.

Before starting the rebranding, make sure that you have enough budget. You have to strengthen your position in the market, but the ineptly planned campaign may turn into another big problem that will just “pump out” your company’s money. To avoid such troubles, do a consistent preliminary study.

If you are working with the public image of the company, please follow the “do not harm” principle. Remember that brand’s success depends not only on its image, but also on the quality of its products or services. If this quality is poor, rebranding won’t help you to boost sales.

How Brand’s Awareness Affects Pricing

The impact of the brand on buyers’ minds significantly influences the price of a product. There are a few categories of the brand’s fame:

  • Top brands, which represent the most popular products on the market.
  • Established brands recognized by all.
  • Exclusive brands that produce unique, limited and usually very expensive goods.

It is worth noting that in any market the brand’s fame is usually viewed as a product category. At the same time, the pricing has its specific features, where the next intangible assets are at the forefront:

  • The price of the brand as an asset.
  • The brand component’s impact on the audience.
  • The potential to increase current profits.

So, in short, the pricing is predetermined by the characteristics that form a particular image. And this is a key moment in determining the pricing strategy. In general, the price is formed from the average value of similar goods in the market and allowances that buyers are willing to pay for your brand. Simply put, you can monetize the fame.

Key Steps of the Rebranding Strategy

Professional brand managers believe that when you create a company’s image, you have to think as more global as possible, but at the same time to act locally. The impact of a brand’s component on human is so great that you can’t ignore even a sequence of steps when developing this strategy.

Try to act the following way:

  1. Analyze the mission of your business.
  2. Determine the key characteristics of a brand (the numerical value of key indicators, the list of advantages).
  3. Determine the influence of a brand on sales: to do so, analyze the current market situation and requests from target audience. It’s necessary to picture the situation more clearly.
  4. Position your company. Formulate the mission of your brand, its main values and benefits, competitive advantages, and a chain of associations that it has to create.
  5. Study all necessary marketing materials.
  6. Determine the communication channels and put the marketing messages there.
  7. Plan a clear sequence of promotion actions.
  8. Calculate the key performance indicators.
  9. Keep track of your process and adjust it from time to time up to your strategy.

There are two factors determining the popularity of your company:

  • lifetime value – the amount of net profits a company receives from customers as long as it cooperates with them;
  • net promote score – customers’ willingness to recommend the company (for example, the Amazon NPS has net promote score of 80%).

Please control the brand component, because it affects all key indicators of sales. Moreover, it motivates both the employees and the vendors. If you feel that you need rebranding, check it and do it. Don’t be afraid to lose some part of the audience and consider all changes from the long-time point of view.

A Few Successful Rebranding Cases

Old Spice

oldspice branding

If you watch TV, we bet you saw the ad in which Isaiah Mustafa urges women to look at their men and then back at him. This video had blown up the Internet with 10+ million of views before the company launched more than 180 promotions in which Mustafa answered the questions asked by bloggers and celebrities. In 2010, the company’s sales increased by 11% and subsequently continued to gain momentum.

Burberry

burberry

Even if you’ve never heard of Burberry, you’ve seen the traditional red and black checkered pattern on a beige background. This company was founded almost 150 years ago in the UK and was on the brink of ruin until recently. Due to rumors that Burberry is popular among hooligans, many people wearing this brand’s clothes were not allowed into pubs.

The new management with the help of a competent marketing strategy has managed to change the situation radically and turned Burberry into one of the most elegant brands. Since 2001, the company has begun to create both modern and classic trench coats and swimsuits, enlisting the cooperation of Kate Moss and Emma Watson. By 2012, sales have increased by 27% and reached $ 747 million.

Apple

applelogo

After 15 years from 1997, when Apple was close to bankruptcy, the value of a single share has increased from $ 6 to $ 35.

The key was the total revision of the products’ design and marketing communications. iPhone, iPad and MacBook changed market gadgets forever and became bestsellers. All employees of the company – from the tops to the sales managers – are taught to understand the company’s mission and to demonstrate it to the customers clearly.