As a company that operates in the business-to-business (B2B) sphere, rebranding presents different challenges to those posed to organisations that target consumers.
Like with many things, there are right and wrong ways to go about rebranding a B2B business, and getting it wrong can have serious implications for the success of your firm, so it’s worth getting help from a branding agency in Buckinghamshire to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Ad Age recently spoke to the CMO of a company that has rebranded successfully. Morgan Norman, from software company Copper, explained some of the steps his business went through when rebranding from its former identity of ProsperWorks.
Mr Norman explained that the main reason behind the decision to rebrand was that many people were spelling the company’s name incorrectly, and many found it difficult to remember the company’s name or in some cases to pronounce it.
However, the rebrand was more than a simple renaming exercise. He said that many people mistakenly think that a brand is “logos and colours”. But he said: “We overhauled every different aspect of messaging that informed the product.”
As a result, they learned a lot “about what people believe, you’re learning about what customers believe”, he elaborated.
For Copper, a key design element to get right was the colour associated with the brand. They went for a magenta-pink, mostly because the marketplace for enterprise software is dominated by blues and greens. This shade therefore helps them to stand out in what’s a crowded market.
Mr Norman also offered some advice to other businesses considering rebranding. He stressed that you should only do it if you really need to, and that if you find you’re struggling with a crucial element like the name of your firm, that it’s better to change this sooner rather than later.
He also urged people not to think of B2B as boring. “I think it’s a time for a B2B to be much more exciting, much more edgy,” he asserted.
Last year, an article for Forbes looked at how you can get your marketing and sales teams to align during a rebrand. Margaret Molloy, chief marketing officer at Siegel + Gale, told the news provider that rebrands are an opportunity to reframe an enterprise and foster closer collaboration between teams.
“It’s a new chapter that provides a clean slate to produce a new level of engagement and alignment,” she stated.
Ms Molloy also stressed the importance of employee engagement during any rebrand, noting that a big element of the success of any rebranding activity is having every person in an organisation behind the new corporate identity and helping to push this and its values.
She also advised involving sales teams from an early stage, particularly in B2B rebrands. This can ensure that they have a say when it comes to key elements of strategies and can help allay concerns that the rebrand will lead to a restructure of internal teams.
You can do this by including them in the initial discovery phase of a rebrand, and including sales leaders in every stage of the rebrand’s subsequent roll out.