Rebranding Your Product; Here’s how

Rebranding is a marketing strategy that is all about changing the image/identity of a brand. Rebranding is that recreation of a product or entity to give it a new look and a new feel, thus upgrading the customer’s/user’s experience.  Rebranding is good but it involves some risk. The idea of rebranding is to set a new focus for the product while trying to maintain or improve on the demands of customers. Rebranding comes as a result of poor sales of product, little or zero profit made from the services rendered by a brand etc. Whatever the reason for rebranding may be, it all leads to positive change for the product or brand. Rebranding effort comes in the form of name change, logo change, color change, packaging etc.

Rebranding Process

Determine why rebranding is needed:
Identifying the reason for rebranding is key to the success of rebranding. Reasons like:
a. Redeeming the bad image of a product or company due to poor services, bankruptcy etc.
b. Renewing the company’s goals.
c. Merging the company with another company.

Create a rebranding plan:
Once the reason for rebranding is determined, the plan or strategy for rebranding should be drawn up showing how the rebranding will be achieved. All that needs to be done to give the product or the company a new look must be outlined e.g. Theme Color, Logo, Name, Motto, Packaging etc. All these can be recreated depending on the reason or target for rebranding.Communicate with stakeholders:
These are the people that affect the product/brand of the company directly or indirectly. Internal stakeholders involve the workers whose duty is to push out the product to the market. The success or failure of the rebranding process is heavily dependent on them. Carrying them along by communicating the ideas and plans for the product to be rebranded is of utmost importance.

External stakeholders  are the users or benefactors of the product or company. Their response to the product matters as they are the yardstick for measuring the performance of the product or company. In the rebranding process, communicating with them makes it easy to understand their wishes and desire and it would be good to use an independent personnel for the feedback as any form of bias is taken away.

Market Your vision:
Adverts are a good way of marketing your rebranded product but make sure a small group of persons get a feel of the rebranded product before rolling out AD’s. Why? These persons should come from different backgrounds depending on the product and how it relates to their background. That way you can get a wide range of information about the rebranded product. This will help fix any problem if identified, before marketing through various AD’s.

Implement the changes:
Apply all the changes made in the packaging, brand logo, theme color etc. Update all platforms showcasing the product such as the website, social media handles, change in AD’s etc. If the change done is massive, affecting every aspect of the product and service, then, amending the incorporation documents in accordance with the change is necessary.

The process to a successful rebranding of your product or company is action based. These steps when applied will get you the desired outcome of your product or company.