Marie Chinnici-Everitt

Companies will often embark on a rebrand for very different reasons. In some cases, companies will go through a corporate event, whether it’s a restructuring, an acquisition, or a divestiture where their portfolio or suite of products and services will either expand significantly, or in some cases contract, requiring them to rethink how they go to market and position themselves differently. In other cases, companies are thinking about how they want to continue to elevate their organizations and want to convey that they have momentum, so they will continue to refresh their brands. World-class companies will do this every 3 to 5 years to think about how they continue to show their clients and stakeholders that they’re relevant, and that they’re keeping pace with the times, as we all know, there’s incredible change in the macroeconomic environment, and the geopolitical environment. Certainly in B2B with new entrants into the marketplace as competitors, firms need to make sure that they continue to differentiate themselves as an organization. And that’s why companies will think about rebranding their organizations.

Michelle Palomera

In some cases, like in high tech, we’ve even seen examples of companies like MongoDB narrow the scope of their offering and make a strategic pivot, and as a result, rebrand on the basis of that new focus. We’ve worked with you on a number of these initiatives.

Q: Just to build on that can you explain what a rebrand or a refresh may entail? People may immediately think of logo and identity changes, but there’s more to it. Can you also touch on some various ways on how companies may approach this, especially if they don’t have larger budgets.

Marie Chinnici-Everitt

Actually, most organizations that endeavor to rebrand often don’t have big budgets. Large corporations, and many of those that you’ve been familiar with over the years, particularly in the consumer space, will often go through very extensive rebrands that involve not only changing their visual identity, but all elements and aspects of how they go to market, including refreshing their logo. Most companies do not refresh their logo because there is a lot of equity that’s been built up over the years in their organizations. So therefore, a brand refresh can be quite small and narrow, or it can be extensive.

In terms of the approaches that organizations will take, most companies should start with understanding the environment. What are the drivers of the environment that are causing them to embark on a rebrand, understanding their customers, how their customers’ needs have been evolving, that will often entail extensive research and understanding how the competitive landscape is changing. Increasingly there are new entrants into the marketplace that will drive an organization to think differently about how they go to market and how they position themselves. It’s important that you define white space. The last thing that any company wants to do, as they’re thinking about their brand or rebranding is going to market in a way that’s similar to their competitors. If you really want to compete effectively, you need to understand what your differentiators are, and why clients need to or want to do business with you. That sets you apart from everybody else in the sphere that you’re operating in.

Michelle Palomera

Q: Just getting into more detail, could you share some best practices on how to approach this for our audience?

Marie Chinnici-Everitt

We talked a little bit about the importance of understanding clients and doing client research. Within that research it’s important to understand that it is not a one-size fits all for your client base. Clients are not alike, and you have certain segments of clients, whether it is roles within your client organization, it could be geographic; It could have something to do with the different businesses that your organization operates in. You need to understand what each segment of your client wants from your organization, needs, and thinks about your organization as well as the perceptions that they have. Once you have that base of data, it’s also important to understand the competitive landscape. How does your competition, your key competitors go to market? What is their messaging? How are their offerings different from your own? What is their visual representation of their company? Then you can start to identify the white space and start to think about how to set yourself apart from the pack. The other thing that is important is to be courageous. Often, organizational leadership tends to be very conservative, and when you really want to elevate your company and make big, bold moves, it requires courage. It requires stepping out from what may be comfortable and taking a chance.

Obviously, if you’re in a highly regulated industry like financial services, you don’t want to go crazy, but you want to be responsibly innovative. You want to think about how you set yourself apart within the guardrails of the industry that you operate in, and that’s often what differentiates how a B2B company may think about a rebrand versus a B2C company.

Having the data in front of you before you start the rebranding process is extremely valuable and then you can start to work across all elements, whether it’s identifying your vision, which is the North Star, the aspirational goal that you have for your company, your mission, the statement of what your company does; maybe even look at the core values of your organization, those fundamental beliefs that drive you as an organization and all of the actions. Then, of course, you can consider your marketing pillars, your value proposition, how you want to strategically position yourself externally as a company to your stakeholders, and all of those elements start to build from the research that you’ve done.

Michelle Palomera

We’ve worked with you in the past, in a variety of aspects, both on conducting primary research with clients as well as creating or updating segmentation models to help support that and to provide a framework to which you can tie data to so that you can better analyze it as an input to things like decision making around rebrands, or go-to-market strategies.

Q: What are some of your thoughts on how you can ensure that your brand is expressed through all aspects of your client lifecycle and client experience?

Marie Chinnici-Everitt

It’s really important to put the client front and center. Organizations that don’t go to market effectively often take a product-centric approach versus a client-centric approach. You always have to put the client at the center of all of your messaging and everything that you do, because they’re the ones that keep you in business. They’re the ones that are the difference between success and failure. It’s important to be authentic in how you go to market. The last thing you want is to talk about what you bring to your clients, and then have the clients have a very different experience when they work with you. If your differentiator is service, you want to make sure that they don’t experience bad service delays or lack of responsiveness. If your differentiator is product innovation, you don’t want to be a laggard in the market. You want to be first in market. You want to have the most technologically savvy and advanced product. It’s important to understand those things and be true while you’re at the same time being edgy.

Michelle Palomera

At NovusNorth, we help clients with journey mapping and conducting service design that provides a little more insight into the end-to-end client experience, and where some of those opportunities are in ways to tie the data to the various parts of the experience.

Q: How would companies get started on this? Tactically, what should companies be doing first, and how?

Marie Chinnici-Everitt

I don’t want to suggest that these elements need to be overly extensive or overly expensive. It is important that you touch on all of these as you think about rebranding. One is understanding the market forces, the environment that you’re operating in, and the anticipated changes in that environment. What do you expect to be happening over the course of the next 2 to 3 years? It’s also important to understand your client. What’s happening in your clients’ organizations based on segment? Are they going to be experiencing extensive regulatory change? Are they going to be experiencing cost pressures? What is their world looking like, so that you can demonstrate that you are relevant to them in the world that they operate in? Then understand the competitive environment and determine the white space, depending on how big and bold you want to be, that helps to determine how extensive each component of the research needs to be.

It is also important to understand how your internal audiences are thinking about your company.

Conducting some element of research within your organization, your leadership team, the vision that they have for your organization, the aspirations they have and make sure that that gets reflected back in the work that you do, as well as with employees at different levels. Firms often forget to talk to their early career professionals, employees that are new to the organization, to understand why they joined to understand what their hopes are, and where they expect their careers to take them. You don’t often think that this is important, but it’s extremely relevant in how you position yourselves, not only to your clients, but also to employees and to potential employees.

Once that base of work is done, you can start to lay out some of the elements of your brand. I mentioned your vision, the north star clearly defining what your aspiration is as a company, a crisp statement of that vision. Then a mission articulating clearly what you do, and companies will normally refresh their vision and mission every 3 to 5 years. These are very important, not only to how you express yourself as a marketing organization to your stakeholders, but they are the underpinning of your company’s strategy. Every company, their strategy, and their strategic pillars need to ultimately tie up to the mission and vision of the organization. Branding fundamentally is the external expression of your company’s strategy, so it can’t be separate and apart. It has to be the articulation of the business that you’re in, and where you’re taking that business.

Michelle Palomera

Marie, I have seen you in action and you are a pro at aligning stakeholders, those initiatives are tough and getting a large organization on the same page around core values and mission is very difficult. It’s true that a lot of companies don’t think to pull in the internal employee experience to help reflect on whether core values have shifted. Making that connection to the internal employee base isn’t always made when rethinking overall brand, positioning, mission and vision.

Marie Chinnici-Everitt

Whether you’re a large company or a small company. Your best ambassadors are your employees, for example when you may be at a weekend barbecue, and you are talking about what you do for a living. You are an expression of your company’s brand. If you talk about the culture, and it’s a bad culture, you may be talking to a potential client. Why would a client want to do business with an organization that has a bad reputation or bad culture? You need to make sure that once all of this work is done, that you’re spending as much time communicating within your organization, helping your stakeholders that are the ambassadors of your brand. Tell the story in a crisp, clear way that is very consistent. Everybody needs to be singing from the same sheet of music.