To get a sense of the challenges of rebranding, we hit the (virtual) streets to hear from leaders in adland about their thoughts and experiences.

Recent popular rebrands, such as the controversial update to the Instagram logo in 2016 or the rebranding of Dunkin’ Donuts to just Dunkin’ in 2018, have shown just how difficult it can be to change consumer perception and establish a new brand identity.

And more recently, the news of EA’s FIFA football video game franchise renaming to EA Sports FC has stirred up another hot discussion on the topic of rebrands, and how to do them successfully.

To get a sense of the challenges of rebranding, we hit the (virtual) streets to hear from leaders in adland about their thoughts and experiences.

Buttermilk – Jamie Ray, Co-Founder

Rebranding an agency or service-based business presents its own set of challenges. It is often asked, do your clients really care? After all, they are not ‘consumers’ in a traditional sense. Despite this, as an agency, we sit at the intersection of pop culture, social media & brand. We proclaim to clients that we are the gatekeepers of brand relevance, however, this feels hollow if we don’t take our own branding efforts seriously. With that in mind, our visual identity is something we are constantly looking at & we have a big rebrand scheduled next month. In order for our rebrand to ‘stick’ we strive to break free from the agency echo chamber & visually encapsulate Buttermilk’s DNA with a distinctly Gen-Z feel.

Tom Gray, Chief Strategy Officer, Imagination

The old truism that your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, is never more apt than when you’re rebranding. After all, while marketers might think of their brand in terms of names, logos and assets, for most normal people a brand is a set of intuitive memories and feelings about a certain product, and those are things that are difficult to shift.

If it’s a challenge around simply getting a new name to stick, then frequency helps – the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve suggests that if people are exposed to a new concept repeatedly over a period of time they are much more likely to retain longer term memories of it – think retargeting across touchpoints

A bigger challenge is one of perception – if there’s a gap between how people currently think and feel about your brand, and what your new brand promises, then deeper engagement and trust is what’s needed – in this case, experiential marketing has a much greater degree of success in embedding new memories and shifting perceptions. Experiencing is believing, after all.

Fleur Sohtz, Chief Marketing Officer, Analytic Partners

As marketers, our job is to create powerful connections with our customers in a way that drives sales and growth. It’s crucial when evolving a brand’s identity to make sure it reflects developments in what your company does and how it helps and influences clients.

Your rebrand must be distinct and scalable to target an increasingly diverse customer base – diverse in what they purchase as well as where they direct their purchasing power. A holistic approach should ensure your rebrand captures all aspects of the business while keeping the customer the central focus. In fact, as our research shows, brand marketing outperforms performance marketing 80% of the time.

Vicky Bullen, CEO, Coley Porter Bell

Brands today need to be immersive and managed on multiple dimensions. It’s no longer just about being motivating and distinctive – they need to be digitally coherent, experiential and intelligent to be truly sticky.

The first priority is to make sure you are telling the right story to the right audience – simply put, make it relevant so people want it in their lives. Then help people know it is still their brand by identifying and retaining distinctive equities.

And you must take the full client team, from CEO to new employee, through the rebrand journey – find ways of getting different people’s input into the strategy, listen and respond. If everyone within a business can understand the brand – can live it and bring it to life – and become walking talking brand advocates, you have made the first stride toward stickiness.