Brand is the starting point for your customers’ experience. It’s not just the look and feel and color and font that a customer perceives but instead is the totality of their experience when interacting with your business.
As your company and customers change, you want to make sure your brand reflects their evolution. Has your brand matured and no longer reflective of all the good things you bring to the table? Now might be a good time to consider a rebranding. But where do you start?
As the CMO of Lithium, I can share how we executed our recent rebranding and hopefully give a few pointers along the way.
Listen to Your Customers
It sounds simple right? But even large companies can drop the ball when it comes to really listening to what customers are saying they want from a brand. When it came to our rebranding, we sat down with our customers, asked them to offer impressions of the Lithium brand and listened closely to their feedback. They used words like ‘sleek’, ‘techie’, ‘cold’ and ‘aloof’. We learned the brand had great visual appeal and was definitely hip, but was incongruent with how they actually experienced Lithium as a company. We wanted to imbue the brand with a dynamic voice and personality that positioned Lithium in the social space and reflected our commitment to our social customers. Listening deeply to their feedback helped us do that.
Engage Your Customers
Listening is just the beginning of the brand funnel. You also need to engage your customers in the creative process. Everyone talks about involving customers in the process, but very few companies do. Just look at the Gap fiasco – where was Gap’s input and test? With Lithium, many people were shown potential branding themes before the final new brand was selected – including partners, industry analysts and most importantly, our customers. Together, we co-created the new brand.
Bring the Brand to Life
Revealing your new brand through a memorable interactive event is a compelling way to bring it to life for your customers.
We launched Lithium’s new brand with a bold display at our annual LiNC conference. Customers were invited to embrace the new brand by describing their own “brand nation” identities with an artist who translated their words and ideas into a large, collective illustration. The completed image visually depicted how Lithium incorporates customer brands and engages its social customers with community experiences.
Carrying the brand through multiple customer touch points is another way to continue engaging customers in the brand. For example, we created customized brand flags for customers and incorporated them into our website and marketing materials and created a video. What are the different ways your customers interact with your company? Think about how you can design ways for them to experience the brand over and over.
Be human
The whole notion of brand strategy is evolving rapidly. Brand used to be about locking down rigid standards and guidelines and relentlessly repeating who you are and what you stand for, while eradicating any deviation from the playbook.
B2B marketers and tech marketers in particular, seem afraid to say: “We’re human. Let’s feel inspired, frustrated, delighted, satisfied, proud, etc. in our working relationship together.” You can’t be afraid of that. We weren’t when it came to our rebrand, and it didn’t surprise me in the slightest that Lithium and its customers had the appetite to take that risk.
This “we’re all in this together” attitude has persisted throughout the rebrand process and informs us still today as we continue to get positive feedback from customers on the new brand.
Embrace your reputation
Consistency is powerful, but brand is far more nuanced now. I think great marketing companies are reflecting a sensibility about reputation – what others say about you as much as what you say about yourself. This gives a brand marketer more room for personality and flexibility, particularly in the social space.
The complexity of branding could be daunting, but instead, see it as an opportunity to keep your reputation consistent but allow your image to “show up” for what the occasion calls for. What shouldn’t ever change is your brand’s essence.
Done well, branding creates a profound emotional connection. Don’t be afraid to embrace and participate in who your customers are. Reflect this sentiment in how you engage with them and be willing to evolve your brand as your customers evolve. After all, in a rapidly changing world, the only thing that is constant is change.
Author: Katy Keim serves as Lithium’s Chief Marketing Officer, leading all strategic marketing activities for the company including branding, positioning, communications, go-to-market strategy and customer acquisition programs.
Katy holds an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where she was an Austin Scholar. She also holds an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Virginia, where she was a Millfield Fellow. Additionally, Katy serves on the Board of Trustees at the Redwood Day School.
Follow Katy on Twitter: @Katykeim
Check her out on the Lithosphere: http://bit.ly/manP6Q
A logo change–or even a complete rebranding–is a fact of business life. Businesses need to remain relevant, authentic, and differentiated in the minds of their target audiences. Sometimes that means building a new foundation on which to base your strategy. Here’s a simple test to see if you’re business is ripe for rebranding: http://www.how-to-branding.com/Branding-Quiz.html