Rebranding And The Elephant In The Room
Jan 18th, 2010 by David Svet
Rebranding is a wonderful thing. The process enables you to fine tune your brand promise to your brand expression. It gives you an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. It is the ultimate corporate fresh start. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to do, especially if your quiver of marketing tools has the same arrows that you used last century. Why don’t those arrows work? Because there’s a new critter that you need to bag and arrows don’t cut it.
The new critter is the elephant in the room — the Internet. What’s the problem with elephants? They don’t forget. The Internet doesn’t forget either. Like it or not, your old brand will live on and 20th century marketing tools won’t do much about it.
There was a time not so long ago that an organization could develop a new name, identity, brand promise and brand expression to emerge as a new entity in the market. That’s no longer the case. All of the old references to your brand that are currently online will still be there tomorrow. Everything from your old website to articles, press mentions, reviews, list sites, blogs and even former employees’ resumes. The sheer volume of many years of mentions on the Internet can’t be overcome with a traditional rebranding effort.
The only way to overcome the volume is to overwhelm it — you need a lot more arrows. You can make more arrows by joining the future and enlisting the social web. Traditional marketing is pushed in a controlled manner from a centralized organization. You’ve been doing this for years and need to keep doing it. However, it is being distributed in a decentralized network with an outstanding memory and ability to spread information. By embracing the decentralized nature of the network and supplying it with great content via social media you can very effectively make your previous brand an afterthought. It will take time, effort and money. Your new brand has to actively be a part of the online conversation. If you have sufficiently fine tuned your brand promise to your brand expression in the mind of your market, you will very quickly become a hot topic and your loyal customers will make your new brand a reality. More hands fire more arrows and it takes a lot of arrows to take out the elephant in the room.
Photo by: Exfordy / www.flickr.com
License: Creative Commons License (By 2.0)
