How to ensure ROI for your rebrand project

00:00 – 00:38

Introduction

On today’s agenda, we’re going to be covering 4 sections.

The first is the size and reasons you might need to invest in a rebrand how and why the approach has changed. Then we’re going to go through the blockers for branding and communication and securing that ROI and then, lastly, we’re going to be covering just the things you must do to guarantee ROI.

00:38 – 01:12

Approaching Rebranding: A Critical Business Decision

And so, first of all, rebranding is often seen as a marketing project. But it should be approached as a critical business decision.

So, after all, your brand is one of the most visible parts of your business, and if it’s not working for you, chances are it’s probably not working for your customers either, and they recognise this. And there’s probably some disconnect showing. So, we’re going to give you the tools that help change that narrative in this short webinar.

01:12 – 03:10

Shift in Process: Pre-2020 vs. Post-Pandemic

So, what we found is pre. 2020. The process used to be relatively straightforward. And then, really, since the pandemic things have changed. So, what I would say is that the old way used to be that you know the marketeers would spot that. There’s a problem with the brands. They’d generally be listened to and understood, and they’d be able to get sign-off relatively easily, to start a rebrand project, the new brand would be rolled out, and then you start to see that ROI so that ROI being that you’ve got aligned marketing and then aligned audience focused brands, and then you’d start to see the return on investment appearing back in increased sales and essentially better talent retention and be able to attract better talent.

But what has happened now, is the new way tends to be not as simple. Getting sign-off is now the biggest sticking point we’re seeing. So, the marketers are identifying rebrands and need to justify them and build a competing case to reference ROI on brand, and need to understand themselves what the challenges are, how the ROI can show up and to talk about it confidently in front of either the board or the founders, essentially the decision makers.

At the same time, life has changed for marketers. So you guys are seeing technology evolving at a rapid pace. Channels are increasing. And you’re being asked to essentially do more with less. So, it can be a really time-consuming task and to pull together this is almost like a case study of why you need to invest in brand, which is why we thought we’d run this session. Give a playbook so that you can literally lift what we’ve said into your own decks, which will hopefully help with your brand planning.

03:10 – 13:25

Identifying Triggers: Internal and External Perception

So first of all, let’s start not with the brand, but the reasons and evidence you are seeing as a marketeer, and where those challenge points are showing up, so we broadly break them down into 2 simple trigger moments. The first trigger is internal realignment. So, does your brand fit with the way that your business is going and the ambitions and aims?

And then the second trigger point is the external perception of it. So, does your brand connect with your audience? Are you seeing challenges? Where you’re doing marketing? And it’s not getting the returns that you want. Perhaps you’ve even gone as far as to speak to some of your audience, and they aren’t saying what you think they should be saying about what you represent and what you offer.

Let’s, go through both sides of those and trigger points. So, the first one is, I guess, probably quite an obvious one to you guys. And you need to pivot your product offering because it’s different. And the old you is your old branding. And actually, you fundamentally change some of your specialism, it could be product offer service areas. We see a lot of people niching down or wanting to focus on a particular message or output. And fundamentally, that’s changing. So, we need to make sure that the brand matches the new you.

The second point we see, which is a bit more nuanced and needs to be sensitively handled. Is that your internal team, perhaps, doesn’t have the same view of your brand as your customers or audience do. So, as a marketeer, this can be quite challenging, because it might be that you’re at the coal face, and you see it, and you’re perhaps speaking to customers. And you understand that there is a bit of a disconnect there, but your board, who are perhaps slightly removed from the coalface, so to speak, might feel that your brand is absolutely fine and might feel like, oh, we think it’s tech leader. But as a marketeer, you know that actually, our audience thinks we’re behind the tech times.

Here’s a recent project that we’re we’ve been working on just very recently, and where we managed to uncover that disparity. So, the brand thought, you know our name is really established in the industry. And what the research showed from the audience was that 70% of the potential audience hadn’t even heard of us. So that’s a whopping disconnect there and then. The other point that came through research is that they thought, we’re a small disrupter, we’re growing and respected in the industry. But one of the many comments was that they were barely organised.

Also, any large change in the business means you need to step back and have a bit of a bit of a look at your brand. So, if the leadership has changed, or has a new agenda. What better way to demonstrate than through a refreshed brand, to make sure that those comms are aligned? And if you’re merging, obviously, you naturally need to consider how to bring that new brand together to ensure customers. Understand the offer.

And just to bring this point to life. I just wanted to use BT as the origins of BT date back to 1846. In fact, BT, quite amazingly, is one of the world’s oldest telecommunications companies. But in the nineties. They made a series of strategic alliances with different businesses around the world globally, and that meant that the company expanded to 170 different markets overseas. And what happened is that that required a bit of repositioning, because the brand name was associated and well respected in our country British telecoms.

But actually, there was an overly British tone and when working overseas, this was becoming a bit of a block of sales. So, BT decided to bring out the new BT logo and the Piper symbol. And this was the era, if you are old enough like I am to remember the iconic TV ads.

In 2003 BT’s identity and values were refreshed again. The reason here was that there was a new corporate identity required, they introduced the connected world symbol that they wanted to come through to reference, that bringing it all together, it was reflecting those aspirations of technology, innovation and the future and the connected worlds reflecting what was happening in society.

And then the brand we know today launched in 2013, and the reason for that was to reflect again that the business evolved, and that they were offering new avenues within their business. So, they were offering a free digital skills programme for training, really focused on the digital side, not the telecom side. They returned to the High Street and paired up with EE to do that.

And they were also running programs around the world and to support digital skills. Including partnerships with people like UNICEF, so the symbol and the changes and the new direction of that has brought BT together.  What I’m trying to emphasise is a systematic change to keep up with entering new markets, a change in leadership or a change in direction.

The last one of these is something we come across quite a lot which is internal teams are struggling to implement or use the brand. So over time, a brand can get quite unwieldy and difficult to use. Because more is added to it. Perhaps there have been some acquisitions and things tacked on, or new services tacked on, and no one’s thought about it from a building brand perspective. It sometimes happens that they’ve got perfectly good assets, but there’s been no time spent on embedding them into the business, or perhaps dusting them off and realigning them slightly.

So, an example of this is one of our clients Informa. When we met them, there was a real disconnect with how their brand was being used across different platforms, and it felt a bit tired as well.

The solution, for this business was to ensure a clear set of instructions on how to modernise and provide a set of best practices and roll that brand across their products, which then let them add a cross upsell. So, it meant the internal teams no longer struggled to use the brand because there was a universal brand language within the business and within the multiple products that they had. I think they had about 2,000 at the time.

So now let’s look at those external triggers.

You might be seeing triggers from your customers. It might be that your brand isn’t attracting the right audience anymore. And so, if you have an audience in mind, but since your brand isn’t maybe reaching them, you need to ask, ‘Is our messaging, right?’ Or perhaps it’s our tone of voice that might need some alignment.

Societal pressures, such as cultural changes that happen within the world. So, a great example that everyone will know is KFC. They dropped the “fried” in Kentucky Fried Chicken because people were associating “fried” with unhealthy, and they were losing customers. So, they revamped to feel a bit more modern and to be KFC rather than Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Sometimes you just know instinctively that your brand just looks a bit dated or a bit tired. If you can sense that, so will your customers, especially when they judge you alongside competitors and over time. What we’ve noticed is interesting: sectors tend to become full of copycat brands. Even with new entrants or disruptors, they can tend to feel quite… samey. Everyone conforming is quite strange, where obviously the very essence of branding is you want to stand out. And so, if you feel that everyone started to sound the same, an example of it on this page is. This was a client of ours. That when we analysed them, we’re just looking in a sea of sameness. So, this is a luxury watch reseller market.

We worked with a company called Subdial, and it was a case of taking them from this dusty very same similar world into really trying to pack a punch. And following the rebrand, like reinventing the business, customer first, ensuring standout rather than blend in.

13:25 – 13:48

Navigating Pushback and Solutions

Okay, so, whatever the reason, the primary purpose of a rebrand is to ensure that the business is creating valuable connections with your audience. And so now we’re going to go through the main pushback topics we hear and give solutions on how to help you with the C-suite or the founders to try and help it in simple terms, or in return on investment.

13:48 – 17:40

Pushback Topic 1: Cost Concerns

So, without further ado, I’ll go into the first one we hear. So, number one, it’s going to cost too much. This, to be honest, is probably the most common challenge that any rebrand faces. Budget holders can often misunderstand branding and the value it gives and see it as an expense. So, they’ll see it as an unwelcome or unexpected expense at that, and rather than an investment. The cost of rebranding and it, you know is about not rebranding, I guess, is far greater than the case of doing it. So essentially if you invest in making sure you’ve got the right brand. If your marketing isn’t connecting, then it’s not going to miraculously get better tomorrow. And your marketing is going to suffer. And therefore, the engaging and that the buying cycle is going to be affected.

So, it’s worth considering a simple argument. And most of the C-suite normally have heard of Warren Buffett. So, here’s a good one to use. Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, Charlie Munger, said that the company that needs a new machine tool and hasn’t bought it already, is already paying for it.

The same is true for branding. So, if you know that your brand isn’t doing what it should, creating a strong, meaningful connection with your audience, then you’re losing money, and in the long term that equates to losing a lot of money. Worst case scenario. To be frank, it can be a complete failure of the business.

But when people ask us, hang on. What about return? So, what are businesses getting from that investment in brands? The calculations on this page show the percentage of a business value that has been identified as being driven by brands. And this differs from business to business. And as with most stats and research, it’s normally the bigger businesses that we must use as case studies because they’ve had the research done on them. Smaller businesses and SMEs don’t. The research just doesn’t exist.

So, as you can see on this page, it varies significantly from this research, and they identified that they felt that 10 to 15% of Accenture or Chevrolet’s total and business value, 10 to 15% of that was identified as being attributed to Brand.

And as much as that’s as much as 60% for Coca-Cola. 60% of Coca-Cola’s total value is on brand because they’ve got the iconic bottle shape. They’ve got the red. They’ve got the logo. They’ve repeated that brand again and again and again over decades, and they’ve built so much brand equity and so much identification with the consumer that we all see it instantly.

And for a moment. I guess if we were going to think about applying that to your business for a moment, let’s say, just for purposes of this talk, that we assigned 5% of your total business value to your brand.

So first, let’s think about what 5% of your total revenue be. So, think about the revenue that your business is hitting in your head, and then what 5% of that is. If your brand is not great, weak, or not well positioned, performing badly. Then I think you need to remove that total. If we’re doing some simple maths, you need to remove that total that you’ve got in your head, that 5% from your total revenue. Whereas if you feel the opposite and feel you’ve got a strong brand, then add that to your total revenue, and the difference between these 2 numbers is what you’ve got to play with in terms of return of investment on Brand.

17:40 – 19:27

Pushback Topic 2: Denial of Branding Issues

So, moving on to the second point, we don’t think there’s a problem.

Now as a marketer, or perhaps a brand owner. You’re probably quite close to finding a disconnect. And the reasons why you do need to rebrand so often. You’re the ones that are seeing the problems first-hand, and have, I guess, got the knowledge and education behind it. To make you understand the rationale. But you might be being told. We don’t think there’s a problem, and this is something that we see again and again. And I think the short answer to that is, if you suspect that your brand isn’t a line of your audience, then you know, why not test the theory so professional, well and good. But if you can back them up with data. It makes selling what you need to into the board or the founders much easier.

So, if you haven’t got it, I suggest going out and getting a word of mouth from your audience. It will become powerful. Get data from your audience where you can. And there’s a plethora of different ways of doing that. Some could be quite budget-friendly, we’ve had some clients do online surveys that we’ve been able to get the right responses from. You can invest in NPS scores, which is another way of doing surveying or you can hire an expert to come in and do some deep-dive interviews to get that data in order to validate your point.

19:27 – 28:34

Pushback Topic 3: Preference for Advertising Over Branding

Number 3 is ‘we should put that money into advertising’. So, advertising can be a very seductive way to show relatively quick returns. But advertising with a weak brand is quite a false economy. And it was Forbes that have a great quote that basically says, if you want to have better advertising for your business. You’re going to need to work on creating a brand first.

And what that means is again, from research. And this was from Marketing Week, who surveyed over 100 brands across 10 years shows that good advertising obviously, can be an important factor for growth. But the real value is when you pair that with the right brand. And, if you look at our chart here, you see at the bottom left, we’ve got weak advertising and a weak brand. And, when you have strong advertising with a weak brand, the uplift isn’t that much? So, you can do the best advertising most mind-blowing campaign possible, but without the right brand structure and the right messaging and foundations there, it’s not going to give you much uplift, whereas if we then look at okay, let’s do weak advertising and strong branding, you can immediately see a 76% uplift. And if you nail both. You’re looking at a plus 168% uplift in sales from your marketing, which is strong. So, the companies that are winning are those that developed a strong brand proposition as a base. And they’ve built a strong brand. And then they’re communicating that brand out through creative advertising channels.

Another point on measuring ROI is that the data available on small businesses is hard to come by and the only reliable data from our perspective is on the well-established brands, such as those are in the S&P 500.

So interestingly, I guess what we uncovered through the S&P 500 report was that brand represents, on average, 30% of the total business value, which is amazing. However, when you look at those top ones who are really flying. So here we’re looking at the brands who’ve had the strongest growth. And when I say strong growth, it’s mind-blowing like 78% or faster, which is huge, and especially of a business that size. They are the business with the strongest brands. There’s a real strong link to growth, fast growth, and strong brand. And those businesses at the top they’ve invested in Brand. But what have they invested in? They’ve invested in having a clear positioning. Then creating a distinctive brand that really stands out. And then that consistent consistently applied. We’ve got to be consistent in this. I find a lot of people when I look at brands. Sometimes they’ve got a strong brand, but they’ve almost got a bit bored of the rollout, and they’ve pivoted, or things have changed, and which is fine if there’s a strategic rationale. But I think getting bored of the same message or not using the same assets is an error if it’s correctly positioned.

So, it leads me onto the secret sauce. So, what’s the secret sauce to ensure that you get that return on investment like what? What? What is it? How do I get it?

Well, it comes to quite simply, down to ensuring your brand is aligned with your audience, so ensuring that your audience really understand your business, they connect with your brand, and they become brand fans. And if we can get loyalty from those brand fans. They’re with you for life. So, for me, I’m a Coke girl. I will be a Coca-Cola girl for life. Not necessarily through a flavour. I don’t think Coke and Pepsi taste that much dissimilar. They taste quite similar to me, I know, to other people. They don’t, but I buy Coke, because that’s something that I just connect with more. And to be honest, probably to do with their investment in brand and advertising. And so how can we understand this? So, I wanted to talk you through what we call the brand performance roadmap.

We’ve broken this down on an illustrative approach first just to land the point, and then we’ll go into the roadmap to break down it fully on the next slide.

So, if we think about what a brand needs to do, it’s not dissimilar, and I feel like has a lot of parallels to throwing a dart or playing archery. You must land the target. In the case of darts. Let’s say it’s a bullseye.

And when we’re talking about business, that target is the customer. So, we’re thinking about it as almost like throwing a dart. So, if we picture that dart, let me give you the overall analogy here. So first. If you are playing darts, you’re standing in front of the board, and what you think about is how to you know where you want to aim. So first of all, it’s about understanding the fundamentals of your brand. So, it’s getting that research and thinking done about where you’re aiming. It’s about standing in front of the board. Where are you aiming? Standing in front of your brand? Where are we aiming? What is it that we want to target?

This will inform your sector, your competitors, your audience, and your offer. So, once you understand, who you’re targeting, what will help you target who you’re targeting and what you’re targeting them with will really help. So that is what we’re calling the fundamentals. So, you’re considering where you’re going to aim essentially.

So, the next part is if we look at the bit of the arrow on this dartboard the bit whether the feathers are, I appreciate the archery, its feathers and darts are bit of plastic. But if you think about those bits that’s called the guiding Fletchling and the guiding Fletchling, basically on a dart that helps where you’re going to throw it. And that helps guide your aim. So that part of the Fletchling covers your purpose, your vision, your missions, and your values, and that’s sometimes called behaviours, depending on different agencies’ preferences. The shaft of the arrow, say, the metal bit with the point at the end is that visual and verbal brand. So, that’s the strength in what you’re delivering that gives weight to your offer. Without it you’d never be able to hit the target till you just be. Have a lot of fluffing flapping around plastic, and so that really gives the weight and the drive and the purpose of the arrow into the dark. Or to target your audience.

I hope that analogy helps. It certainly helped a lot of our clients understand those pieces.

If we were going to take that theory that I just explained and take that into a roadmap model. What you want to cover off on the roadmap is you want to be looking at that positioning piece. So that’s the sector, competitor, audience, and the offer. The brand strategy piece is getting your purpose, your vision, your mission, and your values aligned, and then going into the brand creation, which is the visual brand, which is obviously the visual identity, but also that brand into ui and ux, and how that goes into motion, if applicable for your business, and then the verbal brand as well. So, anything around naming tone of voice and storytelling.

Once you’ve got that arrow shaft going to make you guys your life much easier as marketers, you’ll be able to deliver and hit your target. And either you do it yourself or you outsource. But the tip of the arrow is how we’re going to deliver our brand for digital presence or advertising or partnerships like, what’s our messaging? What’s our brand? How are we going to market with the most important piece on these boards is really the stages that positioning the brand strategy, the brand creation and then brand activation. So, the areas that I’ve just marked in blue.

And I guess the question is, you might be thinking, well, what happens if we miss a few like we’ve got some of those, but not all of them, or just to be really dramatic. It’s something like this. So, if you remove some of those blocks, then the targeting goes wonky because nothing’s aligned. So, if you’re missing bits, you haven’t got that solid arrow, so it’s impossible to fly. And hit who you want. And this is a bit overdramatic, perhaps illustration, just to land the point. But essentially your marketing goes off kilter.

28:34 – 00:38

Pushback Topic 4: We Have no Time

Another reason we hear is, we don’t have time to rebrand.

This is almost at the last one of the later. You know, this is the last reason we hear of the main reasons we hear is like we don’t have time, and I appreciate time is pressure to all businesses. If you’re doing well and growing and succeeding. There’s a time pressure. If we don’t have enough resources to even focus on this or to those that are struggling, it might be that we just don’t have time. We need to put all hands-on deck on something else. Perhaps it’s, you know, delivering. People feel like they’ve got to deliver new business campaigns and or deal with staff matters.

And I guess our point here is if your brand is a problem. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse. Unfortunately, it’s still going to take time to fix. And I think time is one of the challenges with change is to do it right. It does take time, but whether you start it now or push it down, kick it down the road and start maybe in 6 months, for example, is going to probably make it worse. Or it’s still going to mean you’re starting later.

29:47 – 33:50

Measuring ROI and Timeframes

And one of the things clients ask us a lot is like, well, how long will it take? And we’re always a bit like, one of those annoying people that say, Well, how long’s a piece of string? The reason why we say that is because it depends on each business-specific case.

What I’ve done here is just try to help facilitate this webinar by putting some different tiers of branding packages for different briefs that we see, and to put some timeframes against them.

The first one on the left-hand side is basically foundation. So, you’d be looking at around 6 to 8 weeks from beginning to end of a project of this size. And this assumes that there’s a robust piece of research. There’s a robust piece of positioning. And there’s a strategy already in place. So, you guys would be completely happy with, yeah, we really know who we are who we’re targeting. Understand our audience. We’ve got this positioning. The strategy’s been done. We’re really happy with it. We’ve tested it absolutely works. We just need someone to take this and make it look great. Apply that visual bit, and the verbal bit like align. How can we? How can we create differentiation visually from our competitors with this strategy? So, the time taken for that is possibly 6 to 8 weeks, as I said, and it’s about just matching a visual brand to the strategy that you’ve got.

The middle one is a bit more common. And so, this assumes that the business has done some research. So quite often marketers come to us saying, look, we’ve done this research, and this is what we’ve identified. We do need to invest in looking at a repositioning project, and we’ve got the research. But you know we need support with positioning, the strategy, and the visual branding. So, all of those things, and on average, that takes around 12 to 15 weeks.

Then the third option assumes that there’s nothing there. It’s almost a perhaps a haunch of the agency. So, of the business. Sorry. So perhaps they think. We just know we need to do it. But we don’t have the research yet. We don’t fully understand our customers. We think we want to move in this direction, but we need to validate it. We need to then create a positioning, a brand strategy and a visual brand as well as provide launch collateral. And to put that in context, when you’re looking at starting a project like this, you’ve not to think the return is instant, so you can’t be expecting a branding project to finish in the next month. It’s like we’ve rolled out our brands. It’s not making a difference.

If we think about it and step back a bit, and the buckets are still here. The foundation, the growth and the comprehensive, so small, medium, and large from the prior page. So, if you think about it, it’s put into context. If a project, say started in January. When would the impact be felt? Well, if we were, going to say, we normally start to see results 3 months post-launch. And so, for that, for all of those project frameworks that I laid out in the page before. It means that it’s mid-year, or even quarter 4, and depending on whether you know what’s right for your business you get to start seeing results.

So, delaying is just amplifying the problem and the question is, can your business survive a further 7 months of poor branding that’s impacting marketing?

33:50 – 36:53

Conclusion: Actionable Steps for Success

And so, to wrap up. Here’s 3 things that would be really good to focus on that. I think you can get going with and start understanding.

So, number one is make sure you understand your audience, so don’t rely on assumptions. Get out there, do the research. Ask them. You can do that relatively cheaply yourself, we’ve even ourselves have done it, and for clients where we’ve used Google forms. And so, it is possible to do it yourself. Or if your brand is bigger, and more nuanced, reach out and ask an expert to come in and take those probing questions off your plate.

The second thing that I would do is make sure that you have a credible and compelling proposition that echoes customer needs. So, I think people really make the mistake of rebranding. Oh, it just means we look a bit different. And really, it needs to be like, actually, what’s underneath that? What’s the foundations? So, have we got a credible and compelling proposition that echoes the customer’s needs and is really clear on what you’re doing? So, what are we best in the world at doing is a really good framework, just to make sure that you’ve got a proposition that really echoes a customer need and something you’re really good at, and can really niche down in.

The third piece of advice is, don’t get bored and deviate. So, once you’ve got a good brand, or if you’ve even got a good brand like, go back, look at it and be like, hey, guys, we’re not being consistent with our application here, you know, it needs to translate across all channels, and I think as soon as people get bored and start adding in their own flourishes or own things. Things get diluted. It’s consistency. And its repetition builds that brand value. So, when you think of brands that are. And again, I’m using very popular brands here. So, if you take Specsavers. They’ve built within their brands ‘should have gone to Specsavers’ that was invented 20 years ago, I mean, wow, 20 years old. Still going strong today. That’s 20 years of brand building, which means that they can really have fun with it and really play with it, and customers just get it. The same goes for other brands. So, if you think about things like if I said to you. ‘Have a break. Have a…’?

Guessing in your head. You’ve gone, ‘KitKat’!

And also; ‘You can do it, if you…’?

‘B&Q-it!’.

And so all of these businesses. They’re not flash-in-the-pan campaigns. They are consistent campaigns over time. If you land on something good, don’t give it up. Keep going would be my recommendation.

And so, for us, the main message is rebranding is a critical business decision. It’s not just a marketing choice. And I hope all of our points have landed that today.