Signs That It’s Time for a Rebrand

When’s the right time to rebrand your company? This is a question I get a lot, and there’s no perfect answer. There are key signs that it’s time for a rebrand, but we first need to define why you want a rebrand.

Your brand is your customer’s first impression of your business. When your brand delivers a good one, magical things happen!

Did you know that Google was called “BackRub” in its first year? When they realized this name was not translating well, they backed up the bus and headed in the direction that has now made them a household word and brand.

Signs that it may be time for a rebrand include:

You’re Attracting the Wrong Clients

It’s a myth that all small business owners know exactly what they want with their business. The hard part for most small businesses is they are going at it alone. Looking objectively at their business can feel like you’re inside a water bottle and trying to read the label.

This is why I start every brand or website project with a Brand Clarity Session. In this session, we talk in-depth about who your ideal clients are, and what we can change about your brand and online presence to better attract those people.

Every session like this is eye-opening for my clients.

Chelsea came to me because, as a family and wedding photographer, she was attracting the wrong clients, and she didn’t know how to fix the problem. She was spending time away from her family with people who didn’t value photography and saw it as a commodity; that any photographer would do as long as they fell in their budget range.

By walking Chelsea through a brand clarity session and creating an ideal customer persona, we were able to drill down to exactly the kinds of clients she wanted to appeal to and build a brand that attracted those clients.

You’re Planning to Raise Your Prices

When you think of luxury brands, what brands come to mind? Maybe Tiffany, Mercedes, Chanel. The fact that you think of them as a luxury brand was incredibly intentional on their part. They intentionally designed their brands to look high-end and influence people’s opinions about them and their products. You can (and should) do the same with your brand!

Whether your potential customers realize it or not, they are making assumptions about your business based on their past experiences with other brands. If your brand looks amateur, it gives the impression that your service or product is amateur too. Yikes! But if your brand looks professional and high-end, you might get inquiries like ‘I’m not sure if I can afford you’. And THAT’S when you know you’re brand looks high-end.

If you’re raising the prices of your products or services, you should be up-leveling your brand and online presence to match.

And a rebrand doesn’t always mean starting over from scratch, a simple brand refresh could be a few tweaks to the logo, a more refined color palette, or some more high-end fonts.

We helped Copywriter, Red Curl Creative, uplevel their website to match their new high-end pricing. See the project here.   

 

You’re Changing or Adding Offerings

A good time to think about rebranding is when you are adding in a whole new line of offerings because you are likely reaching out to an entirely different audience.

The biggest concern is to not confuse your audience. Brand messaging is important here that you are clearly expressing what this new offering is, how it’s different, who it’s for, etc.

In some cases, it makes sense to actually create a whole separate brand for that offering if the audience is that different. For example, it’s common for photographers to have a wedding photography brand and a commercial photography brand. Those two types of clients are SO different. By splitting them, we can curate a brand and message that speaks to each of their different needs.

We helped local Milwaukee photographers Miranda and Adam build out their two separate wedding and commercial photography brands. See the project here. 

 

You’re Changing Your Business Name

There are generally two reasons why businesses decide to change names; new directions or poor perception. In either case, that is a sign that it’s time to rebrand.

New directions can be new ownership, partnerships, or a decision to do something outside the scope of your current offerings. Both of these scenarios mean we have to take a good look at past successes and failures to see where adjustments should be made. We helped Sound By Design rebrand during a transfer of ownership. See the whole project here. 

 

 

Poor perception is when your brand is just not resonating with people for some reason. In most cases, this is because something about the name contradicts with what you actually sell or offer. For example, if your business name is River Run, but your company actually specializes in tech security, the name might be causing some disconnects with your audience.

You don’t need to have words in your business name that associate with your product or service, (I mean take Amazon for example), but if you feel strongly that a business name change would be helpful, then we can rebrand!

This can be a difficult one because we get as attached to our business names and logos and look as we do to our pets.  I totally understand that for most businesses, the name and branding you chose may have meaning to you.

However, if you constantly have to explain and define what you do, and your friends and family think you do “something on the internet,” it’s time to think about a name change.

Let Me Help You Decide If It’s Time for a Rebrand

Guidance is the key here. Walking you through the weeds to align your brand with your strategy is something I love to do! Together we can reanalyze ideal clients, focus on your goals and missions, and relaunch your brand!

To learn more about rebranding that will attract more devoted customers schedule your free consultation.  Let’s do this together.