Relaunching a Brand

RELAUNCHING A BRAND

Laying The Foundation For Relaunching A Brand

Relaunching a brand is not as drastic as you might think. A brand relaunch is a natural part of brand management. When properly executed, relaunching a brand provides new vitality and relevance to an existing and established brand.

What is the purpose of relaunching a brand? Lots of reasons. A brand relaunch is different from a brand repair. It is designed to inject freshness into a brand. Occasionally, it adds a sense of newness to an established brand.

Why relaunch a brand? Maybe your market has changed or evolved. Perhaps a new competitor has entered the market space.

Whatever the reason, relaunching a brand will cement brand loyalty like Gorilla Glue to existing customers and asks prospects to rethink their choices and give you a fresh look.

If you searched the rebranding process on the web and ended up here, there is no need to tell you the reasons why it’s needed.

But there is a possibility that you might need something less drastic. Something like a brand update or a more specific brand change. They are not necessarily easier to execute, but they have different requirements.

You can check them out later. We will put links to both of those processes at the end. But feel free to call us now.

The fallback defense is to compete with a strong competitor on price or to rely on a series of category best practices.

So, corporations adjust the selling proposition when the product, service, or brand is not winning. They think it counts as relaunching a brand.

This seems intelligent and responsible because everyone does it in a brand relaunch. What no one asks is why it does not work.

Often, brands get caught in the quicksand trap of confusing brand awareness with meaning when relaunching a brand. If research shows that understanding is lacking, marketing departments and their advertising agency (who know nothing about relaunching a brand. They only know advertising. Your brand might be thrown out the window in the name of a new ad campaign.)

So the advertising minions embark on advertising campaigns designed only to increase awareness.

But regardless of the spend (which can be very steep), the needle does not change. The rich get richer, and the rest of the category scrambles for the crumbs. Yet, no one seems to ask why. Meaning and messaging changes make a brand relaunch successful.

Why Brand Awareness Is Not The Problem In A Brand Relaunch

Brand awareness is never the whole problem when relaunching a brand. Never. While it is undoubtedly true that no one can choose a brand they have never heard of, the issue of awareness is tainted by the question of why awareness is lacking.

It also appears to some that if your brand awareness is trailing the category leader, you need to speak louder when relaunching your brand.

The advertising agency will tell you that you need a larger share of voice or a broader media mix.

It is as if the solution is yelling louder and with an intensity that demands to be noticed. That is their idea of a brand relaunch. Not ours.

The agency media moguls can even show you charts that demonstrate a strong correlation between the share of voice and market share.

But they are wrong. They do not understand the science of persuasion and the art of anthropological branding.

Your brand awareness is limited because your meaning is missing the mark. Gaining awareness requires you to fix the problem and improve your brand’s meaning.

Your message is unimportant, and your brand is ignored. Most marketing messages today fall into this category. They are spam.

The Nature Of The Market

The reason for this spam fodder is the fundamental nature of the market today. We are inundated and swamped with massages. To function, human beings have developed a skill of ignorance.

That is, they ignore messages that they deem, on a subconscious level, as unimportant to them. It’s a filter that every brand relaunch must address.

The din of the market has demanded this skill as a survival mechanism. As a result, your louder and more demanding message is backfiring. It sounds annoying, and while no longer ignored, it’s avoided.

The importance and affinity you hoped to stir in the prospect have become its ugly stepsister, a vicious and reactionary dislike of your brand. Relaunching the brand becomes more important.

It is tough to get around this problem because we too often see everything through the filter of our brand’s self-importance.

We think our brand’s values and features matter to prospects. This self-absorption fatally wounds all efforts to steal market share because it clouds our vision. Unless you correct that vision in a brand relaunch, you will have the same mistake repeated.

The Rules Of Relaunching Brand

The first rule of relaunching a brand is to accept that claims of just efficacy and features will not sway those ignoring your brand message. That does not get through the spam filters.

Apple’s iPhone did not gain awareness and acceptance because of its revolutionary features. It grabbed headlines because Apple created it. Brand affinity fosters notice. Not the other way around.

When relaunching a brand, you must reflect the mirror image of your target audience. Your brand relaunch message must be at least as much about them as human beings as it is about your product or benefits.

Only when prospects see your message as necessary will it leave their emotional spam filters and find its way into awareness.

Understanding your target audience through brand anthropology is the only sure way to make this happen. Brand anthropology is a science. It is a projectable means of understanding target market motivations and injecting them into your relaunched brand.

You need to know what they value and what they believe to be true about themselves and demonstrate that your brand helps them achieve that goal. Jif peanut butter did not become a market leader because it tastes more like fresh peanuts.

It became the market leader when it told the prospect she was “a choosey mother.”

Finding the highest emotional intensity drives stealing share and ignites a relaunching brand strategy that transforms a company from ignored to preferred status.

Spending time on everything else is just a wasteful process. It is an expensive litter for marketing departments and highly profitable for advertising agencies.

What The CEO Must Do

This brings us to the CEO’s important place in this matter. Your corporate culture needs to make your brand true. A successful brand relaunch is in lockstep with the CEO’s involvement.

This is true because any successful brand relaunch includes a change in corporate culture. This cultural change is not a marketing problem; any CEO who believes it begins and ends with marketing will repeat past failures.

If the meaning is dead on the money, then no one in the category owns it, and no one delivers it. Relaunching a brand fills the great void in the landscape that draws customers to your brand with less effort and smaller spending.

But it also means a cultural transformation needs to be in place so that the new meaning embeds every aspect of your business, from R&D to sales.

The Apple brand promise of “think different” is not just a tagline. It is a cultural mandate that everyone in the organization and the store employee’s demand.

It all started with Steve Jobs, who made it personal and empowered the organization to make any organic changes necessary to keep the revolution going. The Apple brand relaunch was a cultural phenomenon.

Here are the two links we promised.

Brand update

Brand change