Rebranding can create both terror and excitement, write Sarah Robb and Rachel Fairley, co-founders of Rebrand Right.

Having strengthened over 90 brands, the pair share the main reasons rebrands fail and how to be successful.

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Starting with the wrong remit

Too often, rebrands begin with ego. A new leader joins, wants to leave a visual mark on the business and orders that the identity change. Money is spent, there’s no impact on revenue and marketing’s reputation is tarnished in the process.

Rebrands must lead to growth. They should be instigated to help turn around a decline or create more momentum. When we talk about ‘rebranding right’ we mean making positive changes to your brand to drive business growth, whether that’s attracting more buyers, stretching into new sources of revenue, supporting price increases, or improving employee engagement and cohesive working practices.

When the remit is vague, subjective or divorced from growth metrics, your rebrand is set up to fail before it begins.

Making changes without a diagnosis

Many rebrands fail by starting with solutions instead of a diagnosis. Marketers and agencies jump into refreshing brand strategy and identity without first understanding what is, and what isn’t working with the brand.

This scorched-Earth approach often ignores what made the brand successful in the first place and can destroy familiarity, trust and ease of buying.

Marketers need to understand the four brand factors that lead to business growth – Cohesion, Relevance, Ease and Difference, then diagnose the strength of their brand against each. We call this your brand CRED and you can take a quick diagnosis quiz at rebrand-right.com to gauge your brand strength in each area.

Marketers racing ahead without bringing others on the journey

Rebrands become a poisoned chalice when marketers fail to do three things:

• Engage the leadership team
• Create allies across departments
• Involve employees in the journey

There’s often a chasm between the triumphant approval of a brand strategy and the reality of making it how you do business. The harsh truth is that only one in three strategies of any sort are successfully implemented.

Without engaging leadership in understanding this is more than a cosmetic exercise, progress becomes difficult.

As Leo McCloskey, head of marketing at Echodyne Corp points out: “A rebrand must engage the body politic of the company, and most especially the senior teams, and help it nudge, shift, or shove itself into new directions. It’s not the logo that’s changing; it’s the company.”

Becoming mired in the mud of guidelines and journey mapping

The typical approach to implementing a brand identity is to develop cohesive assets, apply them to mock tactics then define rules in very lengthy guidelines, but there are lots of challenges with this approach.

These guidelines are a straitjacket for the creativity needed to cut through the noise in the market. Lengthy documents full of ‘dos and don’ts’ aren’t read and you end up having to police them.

They aren’t just stifling but can lose you momentum. There’s a much better way to do this using an ‘ingredients and recipes’ approach.

Similarly, trying to map all touchpoints, all journeys – for buyers, employees, suppliers, partners, resellers, influencers, analysts, and shareholders – can quickly become overwhelming.

You can’t fix everything that isn’t perfect, and you can’t control everything that is implemented.

To really get the turnaround you’re looking for, your colleagues are the answer. How they take decisions and behave will drive the experience the brand offers. Success comes from galvanising everyone else, not doing it all yourself.

Don’t let the rebrand stall, weighed down by perfectionistic mapping and policing.

Getting lost in the data

Rebrands often fail because marketers can’t articulate their impact on growth and business objectives. When the CEO or CFO asks if the rebrand is working two seconds after it’s launched, many marketers lack the measurement framework to show progress.

There is an overwhelm of what can be measured. It’s easy to get lost in the data and not know what to do with the information. Presenting too many measurements, or changing what they are can damage credibility with stakeholders who will start to worry that you are obfuscating.

Just as finance always turn up with the same metrics, marketing must too. Take time to work out what should be on your impact dashboard and make sure you get a baseline for each of them before you rebrand, to give a point of reference.

Rebranding doesn’t have to be a poisoned chalice. By starting with the right remit tied to growth objectives, conducting a thorough brand diagnosis, bringing the organisation on the journey, implementing with flexibility and engagement rather than rigidity, and measuring the progress that matters, you can transform your brand into a powerful elixir for business growth.

Rebrand Right: How to refresh your brand and marketing to grow your business, by Sarah Robb and Rachel Fairley is out 22 April.