Rebranding is a process every business must go through to stay relevant in an ever-evolving landscape.
As customer attitudes change and your own visions and values naturally shift, occasional refreshes are crucial to your company’s long-term development. While there’s no hard and fast rule about exactly when to rebrand, the vast majority of S&P 100 companies revitalized their identity in their first seven years of existence.
While these activities are a strategic necessity, change is often hard. Any rebrand, regardless of its size or scale, requires a significant investment of time, resources and creative energy:
With so much at stake, maintaining a consistent brand image in the months and years following the initial rebrand rollout is an essential part of making it stick.
Before a company’s refreshed brand can truly take off, realizing this new direction calls for close collaboration between a company’s in-house marketing leaders and the outside design agency they’ve chosen to lead the way.
Without consistent, coherent communication between a company and their third-party creatives at every stage, these big projects can take longer to complete, send costs soaring, and lead to a disjointed identity post-rebrand.
Whether you’re an organization eyeing a new identity, or a third-party agency being brought on to develop a refreshed look and feel, in this article we outline 3 ways to achieve better collaboration between marketing leaders and design agencies – advice you can use to complete these projects efficiently, so you can build a platform for long-term brand consistency across channels.
Marketing leaders and design agencies: Combining strengths for a successful rebrand
The best, most sustainable rebrands are formed through the combined efforts of a company’s internal marketing teams and a supporting design or marketing agency. While it may be tempting for in-house marketing leaders to “go it alone”, both sides bring much-needed strengths to the rebranding process:
In-house marketing leaders: The grounding force
The in-house marketing team champions the existing brand and drives the rebranding strategy forward. They live and breathe their company’s values, vision and visual identity, enabling them to identify where changes must be made based on their market position, business goals and how customers are evolving.
Beyond this, they will also be key to setting the objectives and parameters of the rebrand project, coordinating all internal stakeholders each step of the way. And, perhaps most importantly, they will be responsible for ensuring the new brand identity is consistently applied long after the rebrand rollout.
External design agencies: The creative spark
If internal marketing leaders are the grounding force of any rebrand, design and marketing agencies act as the creative spark that bring the specific goals and visions of a rebrand to life:
- They provide a fresh, outside perspective, not blinkered by company culture or past decisions, enabling them to innovate their clients’ visual identity and brand messaging
- They offer specialist expertise in creative concepts and design, bringing industry knowledge, trends, insights and strategic thinking that can elevate a brand’s in-house resources
- They often have a broader skill set, with experts in graphic design, UX and digital marketing to help internal teams deliver all aspects of the rebranding process to a high standard
- They can fully devote their time and resources to driving the rebrand forward, giving internal marketers the capacity they need to manage the day-to-day demands of brand management
All this is to say that, when it comes to delivering a fruitful rebrand, two heads are better than one. Not only does success require the base knowledge and structure of a company’s marketing leaders, it also demands the ingenuity and expertise of an agency partner to bring the right ideas to life.
However, without solid communication between both sides at every stage, it can be easy for these projects to quickly succumb to common rebrand mistakes. To stop this from happening next time you’re given the greenlight , finding effective ways to collaborate should be one of your top priorities.
Common rebrand mistakes
3 techniques and tools for exceptional collaboration during the rebrand process
1. A united approach to brand auditing and strategic planning
First, it’s important that every individual involved in the rebrand process begins on the same page. A ‘staggered start’ to a project of this scale can quickly snowball into further delays, while any last-minute second-guessing can lead to costly changes that should have been agreed earlier.
So, how do you avoid these monumental projects faltering at the first hurdle? In our view, it’s important to get both sides of the rebrand team actively involved in the initial steps of a rebrand:
- Auditing a brand’s perception and presence
- Setting out the long-term marketing strategy
- Agreeing the overarching objectives
While it may seem obvious that the in-house marketing leaders handle the brand audit alone due to their close proximity to what goes on, it can be beneficial for a design agency to conduct their own separate audit. Their impartial perspective may highlight issues and opportunities that internal teams overlook.
From here, both sides can then compare and contrast their findings, bringing all viewpoints to the table to establish a shared starting point. With everyone on the same page about the problems and possibilities, you can take a holistic approach to how the vision, values and visual identity of the brand should evolve.
Settling this from the outset should mean the rebrand process runs smoothly from start to finish, with expectations established on all sides.
2. An interactive way to present a new visual identity
Creating the concepts for a refreshed visual identity is a back-and-forth process where clarity is key. It’s vital that a design agency can clearly pitch their rationale behind new logos, color palettes, typography and wider design files to the internal marketing team.
Any breakdown in communication here can set the rebrand process back significantly. Misinterpretations might result in the creation of multiple iterations that cost both agencies and their clients precious time and money, all while generating tension between all stakeholders.
When brand presentations fail to educate and enthuse clients
While slideshows and mood boards can certainly help agencies visualize their concepts, the best approach to rebrand presentations involves using a brand portal.
A brand portal is an online hub designed to house everything that makes up a brand’s identity. From examples of visual elements to dedicated brand guidelines and style guides, these portals can act as a vivid representation of how a brand looks and feels.
Building a brand portal in the style of the new rebrand allows a design agency to showcase their concepts in a more dynamic, interactive way. Then, the in-house marketing teams can engage with it in their own time, fully immersing themselves in this refreshed identity now and in the future.
By providing this all-round, hands-on picture of a renewed identity, all sides stay on the same wavelength and can reach faster decisions on any desired changes. Plus, it can greatly reduce the risk of misunderstandings, so there’s no delay in reaching the final, agreed-upon concept.
Using a brand portal for a design presentation
3. Bring all rebranded assets together in one place
When the core concepts for a new brand are signed off and settled, then comes the hard task of replacing old branded content with new, refreshed assets.
From website graphics, digital advertising assets and social media profiles, to signage, packaging and physical collateral – every customer-facing material must consistently reflect this new brand identity.
Managing these digital assets is one of the biggest challenges of any rebrand, especially when it comes to multichannel marketing. Without effective communication between internal marketing teams and external design agencies, it’s all too easy for required assets to be missed, or for newly created materials to be lost in email chains or disorganized servers.
So, to fulfill this task in the most seamless, efficient way possible, we suggest two important steps:
Create a shared checklist of all required brand assets
First, it’s crucial to set up a complete list of every place your brand assets are currently used. Both digital and physical channels, internally and externally.
Using an online spreadsheet or similar collaborative tracking tool, assign team members to investigate the entire marketing ecosystem, logging everything you find in this single shared list.
Once this is complete, it can then be shared with the people responsible for creating the rebranded assets – be that the design agency or in-house professionals using on-brand content creation tools. This will ensure that no stone is left unturned, so there isn’t any remnant of your old branding present when you hit the big red launch button.
Use Digital Asset Management (DAM) software to centralize all materials
With the new brand shaped and the full remit of refreshed content created, setting up an enterprise Digital Asset Management (DAM) system for your marketing teams helps them bring all up-to-date marketing materials into one centralized, orderly digital asset library.
Why is Digital Asset Management important for structuring your rebrand? DAM tools act as a “single source of truth” for a brand, bringing all content together in a comprehensive repository that teams can access worldwide, whenever they want.
As you can imagine, during a rebrand, this structured approach to media asset management is vital. The right DAM software ensures the new wave of collateral isn’t scattered around in email threads or on disparate servers.
On top of that, because a DAM is a cloud-based solution, all stakeholders can access it in real-time. That means if you’ve split the roles and responsibilities of creating marketing materials between the internal teams and the design agency, both sides can log their content in the system immediately.
Efficient Digital Asset Management workflows allow for seamless collaboration during this often arduous content creation stage. With everyone involved bringing their work together into one shared space, the rollout of your various types of brand assets can be handled smoothly, keeping projects on schedule and consistency at the core of every channel.
The benefits of Digital Asset Management don’t stop with the rollout. A high-quality DAM system will then be a vital ally in reinforcing the rebrand over the weeks, months and years ahead, which is key to keeping your new identity at the forefront of customers’ minds.
By empowering your users to organize, locate and distribute assets using intuitive tags and categories, choosing a DAM solution for your branding team helps you make sure future content is created and published the way it’s intended, with zero risk of compromising your core identity.
Working together toward a rewarding rebrand
A rebrand by its very nature can be a risky proposition. Get it wrong and it can seriously damage your reputation in the eyes of customers – as organizations such as Tropicana, GAP and Pizza Hut have learned the hard way.
But, rebranding is an integral part of a brand’s survival. By fostering strong communication and collaboration between your in-house marketing teams and your chosen design agency, you put yourself on the surest footing to achieve a rebrand that resonates with audiences, covers all bases and drives business growth.
We hope that the suggested techniques and tools outlined in this article make your next rebrand as seamless as possible, and puts the foundation in place for long-term brand uniformity under your new identity.