Do any of the following feel familiar?
Your organisation’s performance is stagnating;
Your “shop window” doesn’t really reflect your business as it is now or where it needs to go;
Your people seem out of step with the organisation and its purpose;
Your market, audiences or your competitive set have changed, and you need to change with that.
You know something needs to change. Something fundamental. A change that goes beyond everyday “business as usual”. A gear shift in how your organisation sets its stall out.
At this point, you’re about to break the glass on the “B” button.
Before you do, a word of advice…
Be careful about using the “brand” word - whether it’s a “rebrand”, “brand refresh”, “brand evolution” or other such term.
Your gut and your logic are no doubt right about the need for such an intervention. However, the “brand” word can be like a Pandora’s box of unhelpful associations people will have; ranging from expensive vanity exercises to hefty fees attached to squiggly logos and colour palettes that recreate an elevator backdrop.
Add in previous “brand” projects that may still be leaving a bad taste for some, and you’ve got a heady cocktail of shame and regret that will rival most weekend hangovers. If minds race to the negative when you try to approach the brand question, don’t waste your time trying to fight long-held associations.
What’s the alternative?
Don’t lose the conviction that you have that a fundamental change needs to happen but think about how you communicate the “ask” so that it builds confidence, not resistance.
Frame the ask around something that has meaning to your organisation and your key stakeholders. Frame it around other projects or initiatives which could be “turbo-charged” with a stronger, more confident brand to support it.
This doesn’t need to be a “brand” project.
It’s a reset, an alignment project or future-facing initiative. Working with CMOs, their C-Suite, and large internal marketing teams across complex organisations, we see “brand” fighting against internal dynamics, scepticism, power and perceptions.
They sense something has shifted in terms of the market – their positioning is no longer relevant to the market and customers or is now crowded with lots of competitors saying and offering similar things.
Perhaps a transformation is being planned from the top. The logic is clear, the destination is exciting, but it doesn’t translate beyond the boardroom. There is no story to bring the rest of the team on the journey.
Or they can sense something has fallen out of alignment in their organisation. People don’t get the vision, they are saying different things to the market and/or behaving in a way that’s not consistent with their promise to customers.
Confusion and a lack of clarity are the clues.
“Brand thinking” can help bring that clarity, but we often avoid using “brand” as the reason for our work. It can diminish the work our clients are trying to do, the impact they want to have and the buy-in and support they need across their organisation, if others think it’s a cosmetic exercise.
The outcome they really need is clarity.
Clarity on the job at hand right across your organisation and clarity on your direction when the job is done. Terms like “positioning” help to create a mind’s-eye picture and bring clarity to what we’re doing…“we’re trying to move from here, to there” if you like.
You might need to bring businesses and teams together, so the job is refining and sharpening your proposition while creating a clearer narrative for your market to understand. That becomes a “One Story” project for your team internally. There might be a new strategic plan and vision and the missing piece now is to bring people on that journey. That can be a “Future <insert your organisation’s name here>” project.
Make no mistake, this is not about semantics.
It’s about getting the clarity to move forward with confidence.
To put this in context, we worked with an engineering business to help their leadership articulate their vision – a vision that involved a shift in positioning – from a manufacturer to a more integral part of their customers’ ecosystem as a data and insights SaaS partner, underpinned by their hardware.
Getting to reality, for many longstanding employees this could have been viewed as “ripping up the history” of the success they had built and it was clear that previous examples of “rebrands” that failed to hit the mark were still fresh in employees’ memory.
The clarity for us was that the story needed to show how the vision was building on the history, while stepping into a role that society and the industry needed. We also brought simplicity to how the organisation went to market with various brands across geographies that had created a legacy of confusion and silo cultures. To give the project the best chance of success, we introduced this to employees as “positioning” rather than rebrand, and a chance for them to feed into the story we were creating.
The result was a leadership that had a story they could tell around their vision. One that was inclusive, celebrated their people and breathed new purpose into the organisation that gave all employees confidence, clarity and the headway to make progress.
The challenges are rarely about brand. The challenge is having no shared view of what comes next and the language needed to bring people with you.
When you can name the job to do, the next step is always clearer.
If you’re at a crossroads and in need of clarity, we’re here.
