10 Indicators it is Time To Rebrand Your Business

Speaker A: Do you ever get that feeling that your brand doesn't match who you are anymore? Maybe you're growing, you've leveled up, but your brand still feels stuck in the past, and something about it just doesn't sit right. Well, in this video, I'm going to walk you through the 10 clear signs that it's time for a rebrand, even if you're getting by okay for now. So, number one, you've evolved, but your brand hasn't. Does this sound familiar? Your business has changed, you're offering more. You maybe got better clients than you had previously. You might be delivering more services than you did before, or simply just operating at, uh, a completely different level than you had previously, but your brand still feels like the startup version of you. Well, that's a clear indicator that it's time to rebrand. You're starting to feel that the brand is being left behind as your business scales grows and hits those new levels of success. So one of those things is, if you start feeling that disconnect between your brand and where you are, it's a good indicator that it's time for a rebrand. Number two, you feel a dip in confidence when presenting your brand to either your clients or your partners, whether it's your pitch deck, your proposal template, or your website. If you start to feel that feeling of not being confident about presenting your brand, that's a good sign, a good indicator, uh, that potentially that embarrassment or that feeling of not wanting to be confident to show that brand that it might be time for a rebrand. That hesitation, it comes from somewhere and it comes from that, that pit of the stomach, that feeling of, I don't think it's as good as it could be, or the level that it should be at, or does it still say what we want it to say about us? How does the market perceive this now that it did, say, five, 10, 15 years ago? So if you feel that and you feel that confidence drop in presenting your brand, then it could be a good time to start thinking about a rebrand. Three, your personal presence is stronger than your business brand. This one's fairly common today. So you might have built up a big presence on, say, LinkedIn, YouTube, or networking through your sort of personal brand. So people identify with who you are as an individual when they click through to your business brand. It doesn't quite have the same authority, the same level, the same kind of personality even, that connects with your personal brand. If that's the case, and again, you start having those feelings of maybe unconfidence with People seeing your business brand as opposed to this sort of successful thought leadership platform or personal brand that you've built up, then it could be a time for a rebrand and it could be a time for consideration, something to think about which is do you want to build that business brand as well? And that's a question to think about. I get people asking me all the time what's more important, personal brand, business brand, and the answer is it depends on what you're trying to do. It depends on where you see the business going. It depends on whether you see yourself building something that is beyond you, that can be scalable, that, that can have systems, processes, loads of moving parts, all those kind of things. If you are a product of some kind, then potentially the business brand still needs to be very, very strong because that's going to be the thing that goes to market. But you also need a strong personal brand to match with it. So it's, that's a question in its own right whether you need personal brand, business brand or both. And it really depends on your specific situation, set of goals, your long term vision, what you want to achieve and where you see the company headed. All those things are really important to think about. But if you have that feeling that your personal brand is elevated so much higher than your business brand, it could be a time to think about some of those big questions. Potentially a rebrand and a street strategic repositioning. Number four, you've been patching your brand instead of building it. This is a really common thing that we see a lot of, and a lot of times it's seen as inconsistency with your target audience. But sometimes what can happen is a brand or a business can constantly tweak their brand. Whether that's a visual, visual cues that keep changing, whether it's they're trying new presentation templates, new social media templates, whether the time, every time they turn up, the messaging is different. And it might be coming from this idea of they're trying to almost patch things up and kind of build something on the fly and hope that it gets somewhere. But it very rarely works out that way. You have to stop, you have to think, you have to reevaluate, you have to think about those strategic questions that you need to ask yourself about where you are now, what you're trying to do, who you're trying to reach, how you want to be positioned. And then you need to think about a rebrand. And it's at that point where you decide, once you've done that evaluation of where you are, do we need a rebrand? Because normally at that point, you're so confused. You either have to go backwards to where you were before, or you need to go where you're starting to move towards. But you need to have a stop in the middle and have a bit of strategic clarity before you move to that next point, because otherwise you'll just keep doing it again and again, and you'll never get to that point where you can just build upon what you're doing. So that's one to think about. Number five, the wrong kind of people. If your brand is unclear, you attract the wrong kind of people, if anybody at all. So a lot of times you won't attract anybody with a confused brand, confused brand, confused audience. But if you do manage to get people coming through, a lot of times that the wrong people, because your brand is so confused that it isn't actually speaking to the right audience, it isn't actually attracting them, and it hasn't actually convinced people of your proposition and your position in the market. This can be a great point for a rebrand because at, uh, this point, you've got a choice to make. You either continue to serve the wrong clients and customers, maybe sporadically, maybe through waves of offers and sales that you have to put on just to keep that thing going, keep everything going. So you have to make a decision, do we keep doing this, or do we rebrand brand and actually think about who we are for what our product or service, who does it serve at its core, how do we find them, how do we package up, uh, our brand to be attractive to them? And then how do we rebrand so that we're for them? This is who we're for. So that's a really important thing to think about. If you're attracting too many of not your ideal client, it's probably because your proposition is unclear, your positioning is unclear, your brand is unclear, and your messaging is really confusing. So it might be somewhere to think about and think about before you do a rebrand. Number six, you've lost that sense of pride. This goes back to feeling unconfident we talked about before. But it's a little bit different when you start a business. When you start a brand, you have this sense of pride, this energy, this purpose, this mission. You have all these things, and you have this sense of you're on your path, you're on your journey, you're doing the things that are going to create an impact, and somewhere along that can get lost, you can get disillusioned in what you're doing with basically doing the day to day, sometimes you can get caught up in that uh, and forget about the bigger picture. And as an organization grows and scales, that purpose, that mission, that vision can get lost and spread out across the organization. And it's in those things where motivation, drive, purpose, all these things that they're so important. And you can actually start to lose pride in what you're doing because you forget the reasons why it started in the first place. We've worked with many companies and many founders who, when you uncover that spark, that core brand, whether it's a founder led business, so the founder's still there where it's a company that is progressing, a legacy of some kind, you have to re engage that, that team, that culture around something that drives them. And sometimes it's lost and it's just no fault of anybody's, it's just over time it just gets lost. So you have to kind of reignite it. And that's a good time for a rebrand. It might not be a complete rebrand or overhaul, it might just be an evolution, it might just be a strategical reset. But there's something that needs to happen to reinvigorate those people in that business. Whether it's founder led, with a small team, whether it's a global organization, the same thing happens. And that loss of identity can actually then start to affect this sense of pride in who you are. And if you keep it for long enough, you, you'll get this issue we call an identity crisis, where the brand is so confused it's completely lost and there is no pride. There's no pride anymore in the business. Number seven, you're struggling to create new content that fits. This one kind of ties in with the unconfident side of things and also with a confused lack of clarity around the brand. But essentially, if you are struggling to create content in one of two ways, one way you have no idea what content you need to produce. If that is the case. The reason is is because you don't know who your audience is that you're trying to target. You haven't got a strategy in place to know where they're going to be. You don't know what your messaging is or the things you're trying to stake claim to your positioning, your kind of messaging framework, what's your guiding principles, what do you stand against, what's your kind of rallying cry, what's the villain of the story? All these things are important and if you don't know these things Then you can't create content because you can't create things that help to define who you are, differentiate who you are, tell your audience what problems you solve. So a lot of times it stems from that lack of clarity around the brand, but also it can come from this unconfidence, again. So this feeling of, I don't want to put something out because the brand's not quite there, or I don't want to put something out because I don't know what to say. I don't know what my position is in this situation. And if you feel like what you're doing isn't quite there, sometimes it can be really paralyzing. It's okay that things are different and that you have to find a new way of doing things. It's exciting, it's fun. Okay, there's a way to crack that code, but you need to understand who you are first of all. So that's one thing to think about. If you're struggling to create content, it could be time for a rebrand. And when I say rebrand through all of these steps, it could be a complete overhaul. It could be an evolution, it could be a strategic repositioning. Any of those on a varying scale from hardly anything to complete overhaul. On the other end, when I say rebrand, what I'm talking about is this idea of, right, we need to think about who we are. We might change a few things. So, yeah, content. If you're struggling, that's a good time to think about it. Number eight, your team and audience are confused about who you are. This is the most common thing that we see, is a confused brand, confused audience, but not just those two things. If you have a confused brand, you've generally got a confused team. If you've got a confused team, that adds to a confused audience. And the reason is, is because your team is the front line of your brand. We've worked with businesses before where we've had. We've gone in and we've kind of done an audit, and we've looked at the whole brand, and we've realized that there are departments that are using completely different terminology when talking about the brand in question. So they'll answer the phone or they'll speak to somebody in person, and they'll have a completely different way of describing the brand. So if that person talks to a customer, talks to someone in customer service, and talks to someone in sales, for example, they will have a completely different view of the brand. That customer goes away really confused with these two messages, and that's just on one level. That happens across organizations in lots of different ways. Especially complex multi brand organizations or multi location organizations. It can happen really easily. And one of the ways you can actually test this is get five people in your business and ask them the question who are we? Who are we for? And um, what do we do? And if you get five vastly different answers or three vastly different answers and two similar, if it's the majority of a difference, you know there's a problem and it's probably a positioning problem and it's a problem that hasn't been addressed. Again, maybe through drift just of a business scaling rapidly over time things get lost, identity drifts and kind of dilutes. It could also be that there's been a lot of people through the marketing side of things. A lot of times we see companies who have like a revolving door marketing team with new directors going in, new directors going out and that can actually have an impact because a lot of times a marketing director will come in and they'll try and steady the ship. They'll try and do a lot of this work we're talking about to kind of change things. But if they leave and someone else comes in then the same, the same process can happen again. And what you really want is someone to kind of an outside view to have a look at it with that uh, director and kind of steady the ship. Because wise it just gets confusion, confusion, confusion as each message changes as new people come in and leave the business. So that's something to think about. If you're, if your team is confused or your audience are confused, then it's time for a rebrand in some, some regard. You know, whether it' this end or this end of the spectrum. Number nine, you're missing out on opportunities. This is something you start to notice. And the problem with brand is it takes time to actually have an effect and it takes time for that effect to be lost. So a lot of people interpret a short term spike in a campaign or a short term spike in interest. Brand, a building of brand. We've seen this firsthand with a business where we did an audit on them. And um, we looked from the start of the audit we kind of looking at the brand and looking at the competitors. And then as we were doing the audit they decided to do something which we kind of said to them, look for the time being whilst we're doing this audit, the best thing to do is to kind of hold off on anything. But they had this time pressure on this particular campaign, this offer they had and it was before we started working with them on the brand side. We were just doing the audit to kind of do the groundwork in order to say, right, this is where I think we should look, this is what we need to look at next. And they went ahead with this campaign and initially there was this spike, there was a kind of a burst of enthusiasm. The problem was the campaign was sending a mixed signal to the rest of their audience, especially their existing customers. And because what it did was it introduced a new product into the ecosystem of the brand. And short term people who weren't actually customers of the brand, these were new people, were buying this product because they had never interacted with the brand before. So from their perspective, this new product was the brand. The problem was the new product was in a completely different subcategory adjacent to the category that they were in, but subcategory that con contradicted the existing customer base's perception of what the brand was. So that issue is starting a, uh, ticking clock of erosion of a brand that's starting to happen. And all they see is a spike. They see a spike in sales from none new customers, which looks fantastic. But what it did was it eroded the brand. And it took three, four months maybe over, uh, that period to suddenly start to realize that campaign had on the brand itself. But people started to lose trust in the brand because it no longer represented what they were trying to, what they thought it was in the first place. So it takes time for that to tail off. And it's. So sometimes it's hard to see where the issues lie. But that's why it's really important to be constantly maintaining your brand to a high level and to be thinking about things like product extensions or services that you're adding in, or new offers, new campaigns, new innovations, whatever it is, all of these things have a knock on effect. And the problem is they don't have an immediate knock on effect. They take time, but the results can be actually devastating if you get it wrong. Because if you sever what the audience the market sees and understands as your brand, it will take time. But when it gets to that point, you have to start again. Pretty much you have to reinvigorate that audience. You have to get them back. You've now lost the customer base. You've not only alienated them, you've now lost them. And so it's really important to, and it requires a rebrand early. So when you start to feel that drift and opportunities start to feel like, hang on a minute, why are these opportunities going, what's happened here? Sometimes it can be because you've kind of looked the other way to brand, and you've gone ahead with lots of different initiatives, different innovations, new products. And what it's done is it's alienated your existing customer base who came to you for something in the first place that you've now pushed to one side with these new shiny objects. So that's something to think about when it comes to rebranding. And number 10, this is more of a feeling you get with all of these issues. It's something that you will feel, but it is that you're in limbo. So you're working with a brand that you know you need to change. And this one is. Is a huge one that we see a lot. And it's kind of the thing that you get to at the end of this situation where, you know there's a point to change. You start to feel like you're working with this brand that isn't right, but you kind of keep going with it anyway. And sometimes some businesses will go on with that for, like, another 18 months or another two years. You know, six months to two years. It can be over that process of them saying, need to do this. We need to get to that point. And what I would urge most people in that situation is if you can do it sooner rather than later, if you're feeling in limbo about your brand, you know, you're working with a brand that isn't right, reach out to somebody now. You don't have to start the process now. But even with starting the process, when we do rebrands from start to finish, with, with strategy, with the visual side of things, and, um, with the marketing strategy side of things, it can take a long time. It can take three to six months. It can take longer than that. It depends on the size of the company. You know, one we did recently took over a year to get from start to finish because there's a lot of moving parts in between. So the sooner you can start the. If any of those felt familiar, you're not alone. Most businesses, at some point in their life cycle, they outgrow their brand or they need to reposition because the market changes around them, um, or technology adds in new products, new services that they have to adapt to, all these things are prevalent, and they happen all the time. The one thing I would say is if you feel any of those things, act on it sooner rather than later. Because building a brand takes time. Rebranding takes time. So the quicker you can get started, the quicker you can re establish your brand. Brand, whether that's a complete change or whether that's just an evolution, you want to do that as soon as possible. And the good news is a strategic rebrand that actually looks at all of those things internally. The foundations, the strategy, you're positioning first before you start thinking about visuals and communication. A strategic rebrand can actually unlock so much more clarity, confidence, growth for your brand because what it does is it can help to reinvigorate your organization. Internally, it can help to reconnect with your customers. Externally, it can help to create a rock solid positioning so that your competition has no chance of attacking you in any way. So actually if you do that, you do it soon, you get it done and you go strategic and you go deep, you have a really good chance of actually not just maintaining your brand with your existing customers and even increasing sales with them, um, but also, uh, reaching a whole new audience of your ideal customers and actually growing, getting more clarity, being more consistent and having that compound effect that only brand can give when it's done right. If any of those things resonated with you and you wanted to talk further about them, there is a link in the description below to book a brand clarity session. It's about half an hour and you'll jump on a call and we'll have a chat about it and we'll find out what the situation currently is and we'll give the best amount of value that we can and insight into what we think you should be doing next and what you could look to do. So if you're interested in that, there is a link in the description below. If you've actually thought about things you're in the process of. We do need to rebrand. We actually have a brand power assessment which takes about four minutes and it will take you through 20 odd questions and it will give you a score at the end and that will show you the areas of your brand that are the weakest. So where to have a look at first? It will give you an idea, a bit of a sort of a deep dive into your brand and it will go, okay, well this area is sort of strong, this is a bit weaker. Uh, this needs some work. So if you want to do that, there is a link in the description below as well. So if you want to book a brand clarity session, there's a, there's a link in there for that too. If you've enjoyed this video and you'd like to see more, please hit the like button and the subscribe button so you're notified every time a new video drops. Video comes out weekly, and they're designed to help you unlock your brand's full potential so you can stand out from the competition and create more impact. Have a great week, catch up soon, and keep those brands unified.