The Jaguar case studies are no use to you
Search Google for “rebranding” and you get articles about Jaguar, Repsol, Correos or Burger King. They're interesting cases and they have nothing to do with you. A multinational can afford to lose recognition for months, spend on campaigns to explain the change and ride out the noise. A mid-sized company with customers going back twenty years can't. For you, the recognition you already have is the most valuable asset the brand has, and a rebrand is an operation to keep it while changing what no longer works.
That's the point of view we work from as a branding agency: refresh without erasing. Let's take it in order.
Rebrand or restyle: decide first which one you need
A restyle is updating the form without touching the substance: redrawing the logo, changing the typeface, tidying up the colours. The company still says the same thing, only better. A rebrand changes what the brand says: who it's for, what it promises, how it speaks and sometimes what it's called.
Plenty of companies ask for the second and need the first. How to tell: if your customers describe you accurately but your image looks like it belongs to another era, it's a restyle. If your customers describe you as something you no longer are (the workshop that is now a manufacturer, the shop that now sells mostly to businesses, the clinic that has changed hands), it's a rebrand.
Before touching anything: an inventory of what people recognise
The first thing we do isn't draw. It's make a list of everything that identifies the company from outside today, and ask customers and employees what they recognise without looking:
- The colour of the vans, the shopfront, the uniform.
- The symbol that appears on the delivery note, on the label, on the door.
- The name and how people say it (which is hardly ever how it's written).
- The way of speaking: how the phone gets answered, how the emails are written.
- The people: in a lot of mid-sized companies the brand is the name of whoever serves you.
With that list you decide what's an asset and what's dead weight. A rule that works for us: if customers recognise something without you pointing at it, it gets kept or evolved; it never gets removed in one go.
What gets kept, what gets updated, what gets dropped
Three boxes, and every element goes into one:
Kept: whatever works and people identify you by. The name, if it causes no problems. The main colour, if it's recognisable. A symbol with history, even if it has to be redrawn.
Updated: whatever has value but has fallen behind: the logo gets redrawn with clean proportions while keeping its shape; the typeface is replaced with one that has versions for screen and for catalogue; the colour is adjusted so it works on screen; the tone gets defined in writing.
Dropped: whatever is only there out of inertia: the slogan nobody remembers, the second typeface used in a campaign in 2009, the three different versions of the logo living side by side inside the company because every supplier made their own.
Our view: in most companies with history, the “kept” box should be the fullest. A rebrand that changes everything is usually a sign that the inventory wasn't done, not a sign of courage.
The order of rollout: by where you're seen, not by what's easy
A common mistake is starting with what the agency controls (stationery, presentations) and leaving what the customer sees most until last. The order is this:
- What the customer looks at every week: website, social media, email signature, quotes and invoices. This changes first and it all changes at once, on a chosen date.
- What the customer sees now and then: catalogue, packaging, vehicles, the signage on the premises.
- The internal things: templates, uniforms, office signage.
And a rule for the overlap: for a while, the old and the new will live side by side (there are boxes already printed and vans that don't get re-liveried in a day). You decide what is acceptable to have coexisting and what isn't, so nobody has to improvise.
How to tell it: good news, not a surprise
What frightens a long-standing customer isn't the new logo. It's finding it on their own, on a delivery note, and wondering whether the company has changed owners or suppliers. That's why the change gets told before it gets seen:
- To the important customers, in person or by phone, by whoever always deals with them.
- To everyone else, with a short email explaining three things: why the image is changing, what stays the same (the team, the service, the products, the phone number) and what gets better.
- On social media and the website, the same message told with photos of the people inside.
Without the drama. You don't need an epic “new era” video; you need the person who has been buying from you for fifteen years to read the email and think “right, it's the same lot as always, just tidier”.
What changes on the website (and what shouldn't)
The website is where a rebrand can cost you more than it looks, because as well as an image it has a history with Google. The colours, the typeface, the photos and the logo change. What doesn't change, without a serious reason, is the page addresses, the titles that rank or the structure that brings visits. If the rebrand includes a change of name, the old domain stays redirected for years, not months. How to do a redesign without losing rankings deserves its own article; here it's enough to say that the new website is planned alongside the rebrand, not after it. In web design we do both in the same project when it makes sense.
Photography: the part of a rebrand people notice most
A new logo over photos from ten years ago, or over stock photos, is the most visible mistake and the most common. A refreshed image needs refreshed images: the current team, the current product, the premises as they are today. One well-planned session at the company sorts out the website, the catalogue and social media in one go, and it's what turns the change into something people see and not just a new file on the server. In corporate identity we explain why photography is an element of the identity and not an extra.
When not to rebrand
Don't do it if the only reason is that a competitor has changed theirs, if you won't be able to apply it where it matters (a new brand on the website and the old one on the vans is worse than the old one everywhere), if management won't be in the meetings, or if the business is in the middle of a change that hasn't finished yet. Nor if what's failing is the service: the brand promises and the service delivers, and no identity fixes a broken promise.
And if you're in doubt, start with the inventory. It's quick, it costs little and often the conclusion is that you need less than you thought. When that happens, we'll tell you.
