Rebranding is more than a new ad campaign. It is creating a new image of your product or service offerings in the minds of your customers. When should you think about rebranding and when should you leave your old brand be? Rebranding should be considered when you have something new to add to your current offerings. If you follow the very competitive mobile phone market, you will see a very strong rebranding effort every time a new generation of phones hit the streets. A few years ago we would have never thought of calling our phones "smart” or giving them a "G” rating, and if we did, we would have no clue what it really meant. When did the flip phone die? When the new phones were rebranded. An example of a phone brand that needed to rebrand, but did not, is Blackberry. It once owned the mobile communications market. Now it is fading behind the new market leaders – iPhones; Android OS based phones like the Motorola Droid, Samsung Note or Galaxy SIII (with Android "Jellybean”); and the new Nokia Windows phones. iPhone, Android Jellybean, SIII, Note – these are all new branded products that have either captured the marketplace or are emerging brands.

Another reason to consider rebranding is when you are losing market share. When your competition begins to win over your customers, it is time to reload and rebrand. After a while, any brand can become stale. When that happens, you are in jeopardy of losing your clients to the new thing. This is where an honest evaluation of what your customers are thinking becomes crucial. You might want to get customer satisfaction research in place to support or challenge your assumptions. You also might want to go beyond just a satisfaction survey and find out what your customers need beyond what you are currently giving them. Let’s face it; when a customer leaves, inside our business we often label the customer as disloyal. In reality, you did not offer them what they needed or they would not have left you. Identifying these needs should be at the heart of your rebranding process. For instance, if you find that your customers like your product offerings, but really need to have delivery sooner than you have been making it happen; make changes to your process to meet this demand and then rebrand your product to reflect this. You could simply add a new tag line to your current logo – something like "To your door in 24 hours” or "The right product, on time every time.” Just make sure your actions as a company back up your rebranded marketing claims.

Another reason to rebrand is when you are trying to reach a new demographic, a new industry or a niche segment within either of these. Soft drink companies are notorious for rebranding their products. Do old people drink Mountain Dew or Coca Cola? Think about the demographic to which energy drinks are branded are marketed. Do skateboarding teenagers drink Monster or Diet Dr. Pepper? Now think about sports drinks and the niche marketing segment they are trying to reach. Do athletes drink Pepsi Max or Gatorade? All of these are marketed to a specific demographic and a specific segment within that demographic. Every now and then, the drink producers will push one of these products at a new demographic segment. When they do, they always rebrand.

However, rebranding can be much like stepping into a minefield if you have a loyal following of customers. And that loyalty can be taken for granted until you make the change. Take for instance the University of California, who redesigned their logo after 144 years. The result of the new, hipper logo was a sea of protest that filled social media sites with "hate-the-logo”. It wasn’t that the new logo had any offensive images or phrases attached to it; it just wasn’t the "old” logo. (Click here to see the two logos.) Haters, among other things, said it looked too corporate. But hate for rebranding is not just an upper education thing. Corporations have had their share of rebranding blunders over the years that set off protests. Back in 2009, Tropicana Orange Juice was rebranded. The old orange with a straw poked into its side logo was replaced with a green font and the "i” in Tropicana dotted with an orange leaf. (Click here to see the two brands.) Customers criticized the new design, saying that they could not find the product on their grocery shelves. The new carton was too generic looking, they complained. When sales fell by 20% in one month, the marketing executives got the message and the orange and straw logo was brought back.

Branding is more than changing the logo. Dressing the pig in a silk waistcoat, as Charles Spurgeon was fond of saying, doesn’t fix anything. Branding involves repositioning your product. It can include the value proposition (this is what JC Penney tried to do this past year) or trying to tap into a new demographic. If you are thinking of making changes to your product or service offerings, give rebranding some thought. It can help capture the attention of your target market. That is the true function of marketing. 

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Campus Protests Return, but Over Rebranding, by Tanzina Vega, NY Times, December 26, 2012

JCPenney Unveils Latest Attempt at Rebranding, by Elizabeth Whittlesey, www.minyanville.com,  July 25, 2012

Microsoft rebrands itself with new logo, http://www.t3.com/news/microsoft-rebrands-itself-with-new-logo

14 Companies That Reversed Their Horrible Attempts At Rebranding, by Mallory Russell, Business Insider March 25, 2012 http://www.businessinsider.com/14-brands-that-had-to-reverse-their-horrible-attempts-at-rebranding-2012-3?op=1#ixzz2HVZNTyCW

Tropicana Line's Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding OJ Rivals Posted Double-Digit Increases as Pure Premium Plummeted, by Natalie Zmuda Bio, Advertising Age, April 02, 2009

Photo by Victor Correia