Are you ready for your brand launch?

Here’s the three ways you should be maximising impact and reach.

Through your own channels:

There are few occasions when a company can comfortably turn the focus on itself — a brand launch provides a fantastic opportunity to communicate the decisions that have fueled the changes and is perhaps one of the only times when your business can strategically position itself in the minds of your audience.

Your new brand might have ‘been developed to appeal to a shifting demographic’; it may ‘signal the shift from being a manufacturer to a technology company’; or ‘reinforce our position as the sector leader’.

All of these stealthily help to define your organisation, and, backed up by a new brand, statements such as these suddenly have added credibility and gravitas.

Think of your brand launch as a trojan horse; the perfect chance not just to showcase your new identity, but to instil in your audience an idea of how they should be perceiving your organisation.

Outbound activation:

This should be seen as the perfect opportunity to develop a campaign that will re-engage your existing audience and attract a new one.

A successful launch should be approached like any other campaign — a mix of strategy and execution — defining who you are targeting, what messaging you want to communicate, what channels are you using.

There is of course an added factor when it comes to a rebrand; newness. This shouldn’t be underestimated; your updated visual identity may give your advert or activation instant appeal. Again, this uplift in interest is likely to be short-term; the key is to maximise the opportunity before its novelty wears off.

The most successful rebrands are always underpinned by solid business reasons, and remember, nobody knows why and what you’ve done unless you make them aware. A campaign based around the reasons for change (implicitly not explicitly) will always be more successful than one that simply announces: “hey we’ve got a new logo!”

Go back to your brand strategy; how do you weave this into a campaign to make it more effective?

And finally, remember your most important stakeholders…

Many brands fail to achieve their full potential because of push back from the internal team. Simply dropping new guidelines onto the server and expecting them to be wholeheartedly adopted (and used properly) isn’t realistic. There may be members of the team who are still invested in the old identity, some may have been involved in its development.

If you bring your internal team along on the journey, they are more likely to adopt the brand and become advocates, then champions. Again, explaining the reasons for change is vital — even if they prefer the old identity, understanding why the new brand is relevant will help them transition.