Rebranding is a HUGE step for you and your business which needs serious thought and planning. Rebranding could be anything from changing the public image of your business to a whole new name and identity, including your physical branding like product packaging etc.

Although it’s incredibly exciting, it’s so easy to be like a kid in a candy shop and to get ahead of yourself. So before you go all-in, here’s 3 things to think about with a few examples of the good, the bad and the truly terrible IMHO.

So, why are you considering a rebrand?

There’s many reasons why you may consider a rebrand:

• Negative publicity or bad reputation
• A public scandal (naughty!)
• Competitors with similar branding
• A merger
• A change in strategy
• Simply because your brand looks dated

Of course we could come up with a million and one reasons why you might want to rebrand, but try to avoid change for the sake of it.

The Good: Successful rebrands have a purpose. Take Burberry for example. In the late nineties and early noughties, the infamous check pattern was associated with hooliganism and was banned from pubs and clubs in the North.

It certainly was a chavtastic look!

Burberry purchased back the licenses that allowed the pattern to be anywhere and everywhere and worked hard to reform its battered reputation.

They appointed a new CEO and Creative Director and hired brand ambassadors with good public images, including Emma Watson, Rosie Hungtington-Whiteley and Cara Delevinge.

Burberry worked hard to focus on heritage and luxury and cleverly integrated technology and personalisation into the brand.

This change in image has resulted in Burberry’s worth going from £2 billion in 2006 to £7.7 billion in 2017.

(Juicy Fact: Burberry’s first store was in our very own Basingstoke! Well, that’s our claim to fame…)

Will your customers embrace the change?

Even if your brand may seem outdated to you, do your customers love it? Some brands are iconic and are recognised worldwide so is it worth the risk?

If you have an established brand with a loyal fan base, you still may want to consider a rebrand but do your research first and maybe canvas your existing clients to start…

The Bad: Gap decided to shake up their branding in 2010 and this included a new logo. What was more baffling, Gap didn’t forewarn their loyal customers and just changed the logo on the website and hoped for the best.

We think you’ll agree that the logo is pretty uninspiring and looks like it belongs to a piece of accounting software. The logo only lasted for a week before being changed back to the old logo. Shocker…

Apparently Gap lost $100 million in that week alone, which is crazy just because of a logo! They also received a huge amount of backlash on Social Media with over 2,000 negative comments on Facebook alone.

What have you got to lose?

Rebranding can be costly both in terms of time and money for the bigger brands, so just make sure you’ve got the resource to justify the change.

The Terrible: Pepsi is no stranger to a rebrand, but in 2008 they wasted a whole lot of time and an eye-watering sum of money for this rebrand…

As you can see, they simply rotated the circle, changed the white line a bit and amended the font. This rebrand cost them $1.2 billion, with the logo alone coming in at $1 million. Yep. And no, I don’t have a clue how. (The boss said maybe we should put our prices up… only joking!)

Supposedly the stripe in the circle is meant to look like a smile (are you now moving your head to see it too?) but unsurprisingly this was missed by a vast majority of their customers.

Pepsi have kept this branding since 2008, and for $1.2 billion, we’d expect them to keep it for a very long time…

Ok, and point 4 just because this is fun… (I know there were only meant to be 3 points!)

In a world where the Urban Dictionary exists, check the meaning of your new name JUST IN CASE!

The SciFi Channel rebranded in 2009 to the SyFy Channel. Although seemingly innocent and phonetically identical, the new name was later discovered to be a slang for Syphilis. D’oh! And amazingly, they’ve kept the name.

So how can you avoid these rebrand fails and do it like a pro? You could start by booking a FREE Juicy Marketing Kickstarter 30-min 1-2-1 call with one of our expert team to help guide you.

Simply click below to book, we look forward to hearing from you!

DID YOU KNOW…

Juicy Marketing used to be called Elixir Projects? Intrigued about our rebrand? Click below to find out more…