The potential for any rebrand to become a time and money pit, rife with complexities and unknowns, can make for a daunting exercise. Organizations spend serious time and money developing the right brand strategy, creative expression and experience design—but few spend just as much time and attention developing a thorough and thoughtful strategy for brand implementation.
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.
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?
