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When you think ‘brand transformation’, it’s easy for your mind to go straight to ‘rebrand’: throw the brand out with the bath water and start afresh. Out with the old, in with the new. But this ‘all or nothing’ approach to brand is almost never the right answer.
There is no single ‘magic formula’ that will solve all your brand woes in a single rebrand – because true brand transformation lies in the minds of your customers, not in your fonts, logos, or colours.
So, if you’re considering transforming your brand, here are three key questions to get you started.
Your brand is not what you think it is – it’s what your customer thinks it is. Your brand doesn’t live in logo designs or branding guidelines. Your brand lives in your customer’s minds.
Your customer’s perception of your brand is formed and possibly altered based on their experiences with the brand. It’s only once these perceptions are in place that your logo becomes a physical manifestation of how the audience sees your brand.
Take the challenge faced by new Burberry creative director Daniel Lee. Burberry is a heritage brand that means many things to many people (including soccer hooligans who, at one time, seemed to adore the brand’s tartan print.)
As Burberry embarks on its new brand transformation, Lee’s challenge will be to translate his vision for the brand – and the brand’s perceived value – into the minds of consumers. As with any brand transformation, the new Burberry won’t be what it says it is, it’ll be what consumers believe it is.
When I ask you to picture a frog, what do you see? Most people will picture a green tree frog sitting on a lilypad. That’s because the green tree frog is leading the brand category of ‘frog’.
Your aim should be to become the green tree frog of your brand’s category. But far too many organisations seem to think that changing a logo and playing around with a new set of colours is enough to earn green tree frog status. But a brand is more than its logo – it’s the sum of all the impressions and experiences a person has with your brand.
Remember when Gap changed its logo for all of five minutes, only to remove any semblance of identity and turn its iconic blue and white logo into a run-of-the-mill sans serif font? Gap as a brand has so many wonderful nuances and a decent heritage that could have been leveraged in the attempted brand transformation.
Gap is a green tree frog, but with its carbon-copy rebrand, it was trying to be a toad.
When transforming your brand, dig deep into the ‘why’ to understand your true value to consumers in this new economic context. A rebrand alone will never solve the underlying problems that are causing brand issues – and in many cases, will simply call all the more attention to them.
Is your brand transformation responding to a wider consumer shift or is it more an internal organisational change? Either way, the change must always respond to the consumer’s needs and experience with your brand. What new value are you providing to them? How can you meet them where they are?
Brand transformation is a complex process that will never have a single quick fix. But by thinking deeply about your customer, and contextualising your brand within their minds, you’ll be one step further towards discovering the reality of your brand.
