How to Rehab a Neglected Brand or One That No Longer Fits What You Do
On the path to a big outcome, your brand may become tired or no longer relevant. Unfortunately, there is a natural tendency to keep things just the way they are. Small companies are most guilty of this, but large companies do it too. One large company most people are familiar with is Salesforce. This is a massively successful company and a household name. Having said that, if you look at the software they built and the acquisitions they have made, they are clearly anchored to serving the front office of a company. There was time, probably 15 years ago, when it would have made little difference if they changed their name and opened up the lens to what they one day might become. Having built up so much brand equity, it would be very challenging to change the name now. I am sure that today, as Salesforce comes up against some of the natural limits of front office software, they might wish they could acquire or build more mid-office and back-office solutions like going into Product Lifecycle Management {PLM), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), or Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions to name some examples. Given their name, however, they would be fighting a bit of an upstream battle to convince their stakeholders that this makes sense. They could certainly pull it off, but with some unnecessary hurdles in the way, and they would be unlikely to instantly be a shortlisted choice in these new software categories like they are today.
For smaller companies, they have way more opportunity to change course than they think they do, but they are often highly resistant to doing so. Challenges that tend to amass here are a legacy brand identity that no longer makes sense, a brand promise that is no longer valid, or a website and collateral that were made for a particular point in time that no longer applies. Startup companies frequently pivot in their early years and their name and associated URL may no longer make sense. Some entrepreneurs actually think their brand is their URL. When a new marketer brings up the need for changes, startups often have a lot of reasons as to why they think they have created a super valuable brand or brand identity. This is understandable sentimentality that comes with the very challenging effort of birthing a company but it is rarely borne out by the facts. Early companies generally have very little if any brand equity, especially as it relates to their market or attracting new prospects.
As a marketing leader who has come into this situation multiple times, generally you are being asked to join because there are some known challenges to growth and expansion that need to be addressed. Often times, entrepreneurs know they have a problem, but they often don’t know the source or extent of their problem. Marketers thus have a chance to shine a light on the highest priorities that would help the company get back on track, however it is typical to encounter resistance when suggesting brand changes as part of a bigger set of recommendations.
What you hear quite often are sunk cost or irrelevant arguments that guide beliefs. “Everyone loves our logo.” “Our website matches our software.” “People know us as X, and they wouldn’t like it if we changed.” “Putting every employee on the website is part of our culture.” Unfortunately, most of these arguments can’t be supported by data, just simply aren’t true or are detrimental for the new types of buyers they are trying to attract. As humans, it is in our DNA to be resistant to change, especially if it is us having to make the change. Much of how we value our own work may be caught up in our own brand. A critical realization, though, is that as much as our brand might have been a rallying cry for us in the early days, our brand is really now for our prospects, partners, stakeholders, and those who might want to join us.
As Simon Sinek teaches us, the goal of a brand should be to inspire others with why you do what you do and how you do it. When you have accomplished that, you can move to describing in more detail what you provide. Your brand, inclusive of your name should ideally communicate paragraphs of information in short phrases that people already understand. This should apply to everything you do from your tagline, to your product names, and all the way down to your feature names. The overall goal of a brand is to surface and message characteristics about your company to establish brand preference for your products which accelerates demand. Humans work in patterns. and If you leverage mental memes people understand, you can communicate volumes of information with short phrases and images. How well you are understood and trusted thus becomes more important than being novel or cute.3
So, what are some key steps to rehabbing a brand?
1. Reestablish what Category you Are In
Most companies that have drifted away from tight brand management many have become isolated or never moved beyond a category of one. I worked for a larger company where the CEO was married to describing the company as being in the Revenue Management space. While perhaps a fitting moniker, that term had long been owned by companies that managed revenue yield for airlines. There was no way to cut through this substantial legacy noise, especially with digital marketing. Adopting this moniker and refusing to move from it created confusion and unnecessary friction. Given what this company’s solutions actually did– once you got past the confusion — they were also in a category of one which makes the whole company less credible. Without respectable reference competitors combined with the category confusion, communicating our value to our nascent prospects was challenging. Driving hard, I was able to help them make substantial progress, but it meant working around these closely held beliefs which certainly metered the speed and increased to cost for how quickly we could grow.
With smaller companies, you have the opportunity to nip away these challenges earlier and reassess whether you are still in the category you started in. You need to define who your reference competitors are now as they may have changed. You ideally have a minimum of three credible competitors at any point in your journey, amongst which you can stand out. If you have drifted into a new category, you’ll have to quickly familiarize yourself with it to neutralize your new competitors and plan for taking the lead. You might have to create a whole new category which is a subject for another day.
2. Reassess what Your Brand Promise Is and Who You Serve
As your offering evolves, you should naturally be opening up more of the market. As you move beyond an MVP, you can appeal to more than earlier adopters or you may be expanding horizontally to encompass a new set of early adopters. What your first set up customers wanted from your solution may no longer be what you are trying to achieve. Closely examine if what you have been promising to your customers is still true. If you are serving new users or new industries, you need to make sure that your brand has expanded to include these users. Is what they are seeing and hearing from you appropriate for them?
3. Assess what Your Deficits are
Some of your deficits are probably obvious, some may be harder to see from the inside. An obvious example might be that you have moved into a new vertical, but you don’t have site pages, ads, and collateral for that vertical and struggle to understand their unique vocabulary. Your website might have become a “comfortable shoe” for how you represent yourselves that everyone on the team is happy with. You look past red flags others might see. As an example, I recently encountered an industrial software company’s website that featured lots of pictures of their sumptuous offices in New York City not deep in the career section, but on the main site pages. For their potential customers who a notoriously frugal, pictures of millennials in 2000-dollar designer chairs working on a whiteboard painted wall are likely to be a very big turn-offs and very clearly tone deaf. Make your list of know deficits, but augment this view with the views of outsiders including customers, partners, and industry advisors.
4. Benchmark How Your Reference Competitors Convey Their Brands
Once you have your new set of reference competitors, review how they convey their brands. As so much revolves around your website today, compare the sites first. Do they clearly define the category you are all in? What kind of energy do they bring to the site? Are they vibrant & cutting edge or are they more reserved? Does this approach match the expectations of the industry you serve or would it attract negative attention?
One rule of thumb I like to use in the technology industry is that our customers expect us to live 10 years in the future to demonstrate we can solve problems for them more effectively than they can themselves. Having said that, they also want you to understand them and clearly speak to their industry and their needs in their language. You have to be able to virtually or actually break bread with them and demonstrate that you really hear their pain and are worthy of their trust and capable of alleviating it. One mortal sin here is being too arrogant about your unique offering or skills if you actually do live metaphorically 10 years in the future. No one likes a braggard especially if this attitude is attached to an aggressive price point (perhaps necessary to pay for those swanky offices).
5. Redefine your Own Brand Formula
To do this, I like to look at the relative brand “feature set” of a competitive group of companies. When thinking about the website and collateral, I like to look at what web content and written “features” they deploy. What do they do with hero banner on their pages, where do they use video, how often do they offer webinars, how do they show their news, how do they introduce their products? I like to assemble the best of the best functionality of the competitive set of companies and then add our own unique innovation on top of that. This formula could then become your punch list of site features and of types of collateral. If you are playing catch up, just neutralizing the leader and looking like a worthy competitor that should be shortlisted might be where you want to play it. If you lead overall, or lead with a valuable differentiator, then you might want to flaunt it with the swagger of a leader. Again, swagger is confidence, not arrogance.
6. Remember to “Say Hello” First
It is important to keep in mind that a huge part of your brand value is the extent to which it creates brand preference that attracts new logos, new users, new partners, new investors, and new employees. While we want to make those who already know us proud, one could argue that they are already part of the family. A careful name change or a skillful change in brand identity is not going to send any of these insiders running away from the brand.
Given this, you need to constantly be assessing how someone new would experience the brand. You need to ease them in with the mission and the why you do what you do, or better yet start off by talking about them — their pain, their problems, their goals. Most people visit your brand though an ad, a site visit, collateral, or a live discussion with only that vaguest notion of what you could do for them and are only half paying attention when you tell them. As such, you need to map out that prospect journey that allows users to experience the power of your brand in the way they want to consume it. Map it out. Test it. Get broad feedback. If your test audience is confused, you can bet your target markets will be as well. For current customers and their users who are well past hello, you can shunt them quickly to additional challenges you can help them with, new news, and a quick way to access your product. They deserve this thoughtful respect for their time and commitment to your company.
7. Prioritize Changes in Sensible Chunks that Don’t Require a Big Bang
I’ve encountered some companies who have been killing it in the marketplace, but their brand identity has almost fallen into disrepair as no one owns it, or it has not been a priority. If you followed what I said above, you might become overwhelmed by the to do list. The key here is to prioritize this list by virtue of what is going on with the business and therefore what is most urgent so you can breakdown this exercise into logical chunks. If the company recently changed what it does, the message and the home page of the website and the sales deck are likely the most urgent. If your name is providing an obstacle to explaining what you do, start there. If you are killing it with your pipeline and sales, but are having trouble attracting the talent you need to continue growing, start there. You can eat the elephant one logical chunk at a time.
In summary, if you are not dealing with a large, super well-established company, the sacred brand is a myth and rarely as valuable as you think it is. While it does take some time to get your brand associated with your mission and brand promise, if your current brand is way off or worse off-putting, there is no time like the present to begin remedying it. Also, remember what is super catchy to you might be totally unmemorable to others. If you need to bring in outside talent to help with growth, you should expect that your brand might need rehab. As you drive hard for growth, the only sacred cows are the things your prospects, your most strategic customers, partners, and potential employees tell you are valuable. Brand is never set it and forget it. Done well, brand is an exercise is constant grooming. If this isn’t how you have been approaching your brand, it may be time for a tune-up.
Ken Pulverman is a five time marketing & product leader whose work has driven two acquisitions, one IPO, and a promising D series work in progress. Ken consults on the topics of strategy, marketing, and product to primarily tech companies under his brand SageCMO.
