Reasons to rebrand: 1 – To reach new customers
A rebrand is an opportunity for an organisation to achieve something new. So what do you want to achieve? In this series of posts I’m going to consider ten reasons to rebrand. The first reason I want to explore is the need to reach new customers.
It’s important to understand what you want to achieve, through your rebrand, because that’s the only way you’ll identify what you need to change. If you don’t have a clear goal, it’s easy to waste time and money making the wrong changes.
When you need new customers
If you want new customers, it’s probably because you need to increase the volume of sales. (If you want to increase the value of sales, you need to consider your market positioning and how to target a new market. This will be the subject for another post). You will be starting from one of two positions; either a desire to build on your current success, or an attempt to address some kind of frustration – falling revenue or sales, for example.
Depending on your motivation, the approach will vary slightly. As a general rule, if you’re building on success, the scale of change within the rebrand process will be less, because things are working. Any change will probably rely on making minimal changes to the existing elements. But if you’re trying to address failure, you’re more likely to look for something new. This may well involve more significant change – but perhaps a change that makes a reference to times when you were more successful.
So what is a ‘new’ customer? A new customer could simply be someone who shares some of the key characteristics of your existing customers, but has never bought from you before. Or it could be someone different, someone who doesn’t share key characteristics with your existing customers, but you believe has the potential to become a customer. We would think of this audience as a new market or sector, and I’m going to write a separate post looking at that issue.
How to reach new customers
If the new customers you need are duplicates of your current customers, then often it’s a question of scale. You just need to reach more people. In some situations you won’t need to consider a rebrand. You just need to do more marketing, building on what has already worked.
But if you’re in a very competitive market, simply increasing the scale may not be enough. If you’re in a position where you need to stand out, creating an identity that is more distinctive and more memorable, might be the solution to reach new customers.
People don’t like to change, whether it’s the brand of baked beans they buy or where they get their legal advice. They’re not looking for alternative options. They’re happy to stick with what’s familiar, so if you want them to do something different, you need to make an impression. A rebrand can be the opportunity to do that.
The final point to consider is that companies change, over time. And the brand that represents them may need to change too. Not all change is dramatic – great leaps forward in products or services. But over time what a company does, and the way it does it, will evolve. In order to remain relevant to your audience, and maintain the flow of new customers to your business, your brand might need to evolve as well.
For any ambitious business the ability to reach new customers is the foundation of success. As circumstances change, there will be a need to adjust and adapt. Whether it is planned change within your business or unanticipated change outside it, there will be a need to communicate clearly what it is that makes you different from your competitors. A rebrand is the opportunity to do that, to make your business distinctive and memorable, and in a position to reach new customers.
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Read more in our Reasons To Rebrand series
2: To challenge a new competitor