When was the last time you asked your best clients what they really thought about your brand. Usually we are so on the go that we don’t take a step back and make sure that what we set out to do still resonates with our clients or audience. Does your mission and vision statement still hold up? Are your core values still the core values you set up a year ago, five, ten years ago? If you don’t have a clear direction about your brand then how do you expect your clients or audience to have a clear direction.
This happens to companies whether they are run by one person or are a multimillion-dollar company with over 400 employees. It has been two years now since Triad, which was once a global company with over 700+ employees, revealed their new brand. Going from Triad Retail Media to just Triad. It was a huge deal to drop the Retail Media in their name and they wouldn’t have been able to come to that conclusion with out doing this first.
The world of retail was changing, and Triad needed to change as well to keep up with the demands of their clients and their audience.
One thing that got me super excited once Triad started the re-branding process was all the behind the scenes work that goes into a re-brand. It’s so much more than waking up one morning and deciding to change everything about your company - the messaging, the core values, colors, fonts, and most importantly the logo.
As people on the outside, we usually just see the press release of a major company launching their new brand such as how GM just recently re-branded. BAM Hello world, here is our new logo. But you maybe asking yourself, how did they get there, what all goes into re-branding a company large or small?
If you are thinking that you are headed towards re-branding your company then you might want to take a look at my Brand Assessment Guide HERE. It gives you a good outline of what you need when you are thinking of doing a re-brand or a brand refresh.
Re-branding a multimillion-dollar company in less than a year.
I started working at Triad in 2013 and they had just updated their branding with the ‘shopping cart’ logo that over the years people learned to love and hate. I started on the Corporate Marketing Team and my desk was a card table set up in my boss’ office with our marketing manager at a smaller desk as well. We became family very quickly before we moved into the new building.
If your brand is not communicating what your company is about or what your clients are looking for it’s time for a re-brand.
As the years progressed the ‘shopping chart’ logo just was not working for us. It did not really communicate what we were offering and what the market was wanting. Triad was unique and we not only communicate to brands, but also to retailers and to the people who were shopping at the retail stores looking for their favorite brands. With how quickly things were changing in the retail space Triad needed to change too.
Finally taking the leap to re-brand a 400+ employee company.
We started off by asking our internal team members what they REALLY thought about Triad. We worked with the brand every day, so who better to ask but our own employees to get the first layer of insights. I worked with our marketing team and our events team to design a whole day around capturing key detail about what our own people really thought about our brand and what our customers are saying to them about our brand. We called it Brand Forward Day. And boy did they did not hold anything back!
When re-branding a company with employees it’s important to get them involved, they are part of the brand as much as the CEO and the rest of the executive team.
It was such a fun day with three stations where people took polls, answered a questionnaire, and had a live quiz where they wrote down answers and flashed them up on a white board. It was quite comical and kind of eye opening when people couldn’t even name our core values. Triad did have nine in their defense. We also gave away fun little prizes and had food throughout the day. When the day was done we had a ton of awesome data to go through. The team and I were tasked to take this data and look at the trends and what people really thought about our brand and what direction they feel we are going. ‘Kill the Cart” was a common theme. We also discovered that we were coming off too technical and not relating to the people. We wouldn’t have been able to come to these conclusion if we didn’t take these steps first by getting our employees involved.
The data you gather from your internal team and external clients is extremely valuable It tells you exactly what direction you are heading and if you listen, it will tell you what you need to change.
Over the next few months we then interviewed our Executive Team, key stakeholders, people that we worked with closely outside of Triad to get their perspective of the direction we were headed and where they thought we needed to be.
Everything you just discovered about your company is gold!
This is extremely valuable information that you need to be able to form an unbiased decision into what the next steps into your re-brand will be. Everything that you have collected from your employees, if you have employees, and from your external clients will tell you want you need to get rid of, what kind of brand equity you have and what you should keep. Think of it like this. If Harley Davidson decided to re-brand and changed their iconic orange to green, what do you think their brand loyalist would say. They would lose their freaking mind.
That is why it is so important to do these steps first. You just invested a ton of money into re-branding your company, and you want to do it right so you don’t have to do it again.
If you are ready to take the next steps and see what your audience really says about your company let’s schedule a call and talk about your goals.