Thinking about a rebrand but wondering whether the benefits of rebranding are worth it? If so, this blog post is for you.
The benefits of rebranding begin with one simple truth: your brand is your company’s most valuable asset.
Your brand is how your organization is perceived by your customers, your employees, and other key stakeholders. Shaping those perceptions is the key to influencing behavior. The types of behavior that directly impact your bottom line.
When you consider just how valuable your brand is, it’s hard to argue that rebranding isn’t one of the best investments you can make.
Still not convinced? In this post, we’ll explore 7 benefits of rebranding that are sure to change your mind.
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What is Rebranding?
Rebranding is the process of reshaping how a company or product is perceived. Rebranding can include the reinvention of everything from a brand’s name and tagline to its logo and visual identity to its website and marketing collateral.
Rebranding is most effective when it starts with brand research before moving into brand positioning, verbal and visual identity, and, finally, brand activation.
The 7 Benefits of Rebranding
Rebranding shouldn’t be seen as another cost counted against your marketing budget. Rebranding is an investment—one that, if done right, will yield exponential returns over the life of your business.
Here are 7 benefits of rebranding that are hard to argue with:
1. Attract More and Better Customers
A key part of rebranding, brand research helps you identify exactly which customers are aligned with your brand’s unique purpose and positioning.
Not only are the right customers more likely to purchase your product or service, they’re also willing to pay more, and are measurably more loyal over the lifetime of their relationship with your brand.
This brand loyalty becomes exponentially valuable when your customers become brand advocates, convincing their friends and family to buy your products or services as well.
Finally, rebranding is an opportunity to develop clearly defined customer personas, which allow you to craft compelling brand messaging specifically targeted at the right customers.
2. Command Premium Prices
Your brand ultimately boils down to customer perception, so the monetary value of your offerings is entrenched in the minds of those you serve.
One of the most measurable benefits of rebranding is that it allows you to redefine the value customers place on your offerings—and raise your asking price accordingly.
The ROI of branding has been proven by research, time and again. Strong brands are more profitable, build more equity, and sell at higher multiples.
This is because a strong brand is more than just a sleek logo and clever tagline. A strong brand has measurably more pricing power than its competitors.
The pricing power of strong brands allows them to dominate their respective markets, revitalize underperforming assets, and insulate against competitive threats. Pricing power drives growth like few other market factors.
3. Differentiate from the Competition
Branding is all about competitive differentiation. But you’d be surprised how few companies are able to effectively communicate—or even identify—their key differentiators.
Sales and business growth can be extremely challenging when you don’t have clearly articulated differentiators. Both your employees and your customers must understand why your brand is superior to the competition.
One of the most valuable benefits of rebranding is that it can help you clearly define your key differentiators, including your competitive advantage.
At the end of the day, no competitive advantage is as powerful or sustainable as a strong brand. As is evident in a wildly effective brand like Apple, a strong brand lets you outcompete the field whether your products or services are tangibly superior or not.
4. Close Sales More Easily
The difference between trying to sell a boring, outdated brand and a fresh, boldly differentiated brand is like the difference between trying to sell a jalopy and a Ferrari.
Well-defined brands are easier to sell because their value propositions are built into their brand narrative. Rebranding ensures that the argument for the unique superiority of your products or services is baked into your brand narrative.
Another one of the key benefits of rebranding is that it gives you a cohesive and compelling brand, meaning most of the work is already done for the salesperson before the initial conversation. It gives your sales team the advantage it needs to close deals with confidence and ease.
5. Reduce Marketing Costs
The cohesive, well-articulated brand that emerges from a successful rebranding initiative increases the efficiency and effectiveness of all your marketing efforts.
Better understanding your audience through brand research enables you to develop campaigns with highly relevant brand messaging targeted at your most valuable customer segments. No more wasted effort in scattershot messaging.
Brand cohesiveness also means that marketing efforts are seamlessly integrated—each of your initiatives reinforces the others. And the bold new identity that comes from rebranding means that campaigns are radically differentiated right out the gate.
Finally, the brand guidelines and templates that emerge from the rebranding process ensure you aren’t reinventing the wheel on brand design every time you produce new marketing collateral.
6. Attract Top Talent
The best brands have a way of attracting the best talent. Not just the most impressive resumes, mind you, but the talent that is best suited to their unique needs and goals.
Among the internal benefits of rebranding is that it enables you to redefine your brand not just for your customers, but for your current and future employees as well.
A strong employer brand attracts the most motivated and talented folks from the competitive job pool. It ensures you’re interviewing candidates aligned with your core values and committed to delivering on your brand promise.
Rebranding is the best way to attract the candidates who will turn into spirited employees, positively contribute to company culture, and foster trust with customers and teammates alike.
7. Boost the Value of Your Company
The increased brand equity that comes from rebranding is a powerful thing. Not only does it enable you to increase the price point of your products or services, but it also has a measurable effect on share price as well.
Rebranding positively impacts customer perception, which positively impacts customer behavior, which positively impacts your brand’s financial performance.
One of the most valuable long-term benefits of rebranding is that your brand becomes a more valuable asset when it comes time to sell the company.
Much like the renovations you make to your home over the years, rebranding is an investment whose dividends pay off even more if and when you decide to exit the company.
Examples of Successful Rebrands
For the world’s top brands, rebrands and brand refreshes are common occurrences. Strong brands should be refreshed every 3 to 5 years and rebranded every 7 to 10 years.
These rebranding guidelines go for B2B brands as well as B2C brands. In a modern world of dynamic digital media, brand perception is critical regardless of which sphere your company operates in.
What follows some examples of companies that have successfully rebranded in both spaces. As you’ll see, the benefits of rebranding have real world business implications.
Bain Capital
Bain Capital is one of the world’s leading private multi-asset investment firms. In 2018, the firm realized it needed to formally define a brand strategy that could powerfully articulate the values at the core of its success and serve as a unifying story for its businesses across the board.
The challenge was to unlock the value inherent in the brand and create new opportunities for greater business advantage.
The new Bain brand unites all its independent business units under a new brand architecture that unifies the firm under a shared expression, leveraging both the name and the stature of the firm.
The brand’s new visual identity united the businesses through an ownable, shared symbol, and a flexible visual system that integrates elements of the symbol to create a distinctive Bain Capital expression across print and digital channels.
C-SPAN
In a sea of biased cable news outlets, only C-SPAN carries the non-partisan mantle with true authority. The brand is often lovingly parodied for its no-nonsense, straightlaced approach.
C-SPAN’s 40th anniversary was an opportunity to update its stodgy image with a focus on the brand’s relevance, breadth, and uniqueness.
The new C-SPAN visual identity was designed to work across a vast broadcast, print and online landscape, including multiple television channels and digital assets. New messaging reminded viewers that C-SPAN is unique in its unbiased reporting.
General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT)
A leading government systems integrator, GDIT acquired IT giant CSRA in 2018 and sought to rebrand the incredible array of IT services and government experience under a unified brand expression.
The new brand needed to stand out among longstanding, traditional federal systems integrators, many of which who look and sound nearly identical, as well as compete with newer tech players pursuing large-scale government contacts.
The new GDIT brand was positioned to embody both past performance and future capabilities, expressing GDIT’s complex capabilities in a sophisticated way that elevates the role of its employees.
CVS Extra Care
With over 158,000 pharmacies and $177.52 billion dollars in annual revenue, CVS is one of the largest pharmacy brands in the U.S.
But when the brand’s highly personalized, digital loyalty program, CVS ExtraCare, began to see flagging membership numbers and complaints of complexity, the company decided a rebrand was in order.
The new CVS Extra Care comprised an energetic visual identity and messaging to drive excitement and action. A robust palette of brand elements was created to support the new positioning and elevate the program.
The new logo, color palette, and photography style embody the delight that comes from the abundance of savings, rewards and offers that CVS customers want.
The Takeaway
When you look at rebranding as an investment, rather than a cost, the benefits are clear. Rebranding pays out over the lifetime of your company, enabling you to attract better customers, with more authority, while commanding higher prices for your products or services.
Furthermore, customer loyalty, market leadership, and brand equity position your business for an exponential return on investment. If ever there were a no-brainer investment for your company’s future, rebranding is it.
Brian Lischer
A prolific blogger, speaker, and columnist, Brian has two decades of experience in design and branding. He’s written for publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, HuffPost, and Brand Quarterly.
