Rebranding is a business decision that can bring valuable, indisputable benefits. It is not, however, mandatory in the life of any organization.

Rebranding that isn’t based on real needs, ill-planned and coordinated, only succeeds in unnecessarily (and sometimes irreparably) shaking organizations and their customers.

Other times, in the case of very large organizations, the rebranding can take place progressively, in gradual steps, such as renewing the communication platform, rethinking the brand platform and preparing the organization for major business model transformations.

How can you tell if your business needs a new brand message, if the organization could make the necessary rebranding effort, if the management can take the path of transformation or if your customers brand experience expectations have changed?

You can get your answers form a dedicated internal team that you can create to analyse the various information inside and outside the organization. The role of this team will be to obtain and integrate information from various business areas and then draft recommendations on the necessity and magnitude of a change at the internal and / or external brand level.

The information range can be expanded to contain customer insights, expectations and satisfaction levels from monitored customer relationships, results from market studies, marketing data from social media, the company’s availability to accept, organize and sustain the challenge of such change,  as well as its confidence in the process.

In Brandfusion’s 13 years of brand consulting and design experience, organizations are rarely capable to mobilize in such self-evaluating actions, to find out if they need a rebranding, for three main reasons:

• The team lacks the experience to conduct such an integrated self-assessing process, which, in most cases, only occurs once in the life of a professional.
• The team’s enthusiasm and dedication - typical for short-term projects with well-defined KPIs - easily dwindle during a rebranding process, a long-term management initiative with intangible performance indicators such as perceptions, attitudes and working processes.
• Most Romanian organizations do not have a brand-based corporate culture and therefore do not fully understand the role of the brand in the success of a business. Even when there is a coherent marketing structure, established performance indicators are traditional, reflecting price, promotion, advertising, etc. and almost non-existent when it comes to the brand of the company (customer satisfaction with the brand, the intention to buy the brand, the customer's willingness to recommend the brand, etc.). Therefore, such teams do not benefit from the expertise of experienced brand management professionals that offer credibility to the process and promote the brand concept within the organization.

The drawbacks mentioned above are removed by working with a brand specialised team, which can manage the whole brand audit process. In addition, the client-company benefits from:   

1. An objective, professionally articulated analysis of the brand's status both internally and externally. It is essential that brand consultants contribute their experience to turn diverse and complex information into discoveries relevant for the future of the brand.

2. Access to a set of recommendations for strategic branding initiatives, tailored to the business goals and the organization's ability to put them into practice.

3. Access to a coherent plan for the implementation of the respective recommendations.

4. Increasing the credibility of the audit and, further, of the rebranding process, within the organization, by allowing the brand consultants team to work together with the project team.

5. Access to branding knowledge, through the constant transfer of information from the consultants to the client's project team.

6. A higher volume of relevant information gathered from the organization, as employees tend to be more open with independent consultants than their colleagues.

However, before deciding to rebrand or not to rebrand, it may be worth considering a brand audit, to find out where your brand stands today, how your customers and prospects perceive it, how their experience with your brand may be improved or refined or how deep the organisation’s transformation needs to be.

And whether you do it with your internal team or an external team of brand consultants, the brand audit can shine a light on an organisation’s decision to pursue a baby-steps, stage-by-stage rebranding, to delve into profound change or to decide that rebranding is not the solution it needs at the moment.