Chapter 3
The rebranding process
Tackling a (re)brand can be daunting. Especially when your budget is tight.
We all work with companies moving out of early-stage and into growth-stage.
We love it because you guys are scrappy, smart, and ambitious.
All these wonderful traits can sometimes get in the way of the rebranding process though, because it’s easy to think, “We should be able to do this in-house.”
The truth: you should definitely be able to manage your brand in house. But when it comes to brand creation, it helps to have some outside perspective. It’s difficult to read the label from inside the bottle.
Your branding process can be split into three general phases.
It’s easy to say, “I want to go to Austria!”
It’s another thing to get there without a map. The Strategy phase is when you evaluate where you are in the market, where you want to be, and determine a rough outline of how to get there.
During this phase, you should work through positioning workshops, audience workshops, and brand narrative workshops. You want to understand your strengths, and who is going to care most about those.
It can be tempting to skip the Strategy phase. This is hard work, and isn’t exactly creative or fun. But this is where the magic happens that pushes your business forward — not in the creative.
Once you’ve set the strategy, you have to create the assets and guidelines.
This is the delightfully creative part of the process where you’ll look at colour palettes, emotions, illustrations, and more.
If the setting the strategy was like the process of making a map and deciding where you want to go, the Creation phase is where you create a GPS guide that gives turn-by-turn instructions on how to get there.
As you evaluate agencies and freelancers, ask to see examples of the visual guidelines and voice guidelines they will deliver. You want clear, detailed documentation that lets your in-house team move forward and maintain consistency at scale.
Visual guidelines
Visual brand guidelines take your positioning and messaging and translate it into a graphic identity. Your designer will come up with out-of-the-box ways to visualise your business strategy. Great designers will give you systems that your in-house design team can use to maintain consistency as you scale.
Here’s an example of what top-notch visual guidelines look like. You should benchmark your agencies against this type of documentation.
Verbal guidelines
Verbal brand guidelines do the same thing, but for words. You’ll work with a writer to figure out what emotions you want to convey, and they’ll translate that into a voice guide. Good voice guides give you a framework that lets anybody in your business talk about your offer in an on-brand way.
Here’s an example of what a usable voice guide looks like. It should be significantly more robust than three adjectives.
Website and collateral
The first piece of collateral most businesses want to work on with a new brand is their website. When you’re evaluating contractors and agencies, see if this is something they can support you with.
Eventually you have to say goodbye to your branding agency and take on the role of Creative Director in-house.
You don’t have to be an expert designer or writer to do this, but you do need to have ownership of the brand, and be willing to defend it.
You can either hire a designer and a writer to come in-house, or you can work with freelancers. What’s important is to work with people who understand the brand vision, and who can use the guidelines set out by an agency to execute on it.
When do you know you’re done?
Many marketing teams think of brand as a one-year project. The truth is that it’s more of a product that requires continuous development and refinement. It’s never “done.”
That’s not an easy answer (we’re here to tell you the truth, not what you want to hear). But you should know if your brand is working when:
