5 things leaders get wrong about rebranding: What you don’t know until you’ve been through it

If you have never gone through a rebranding process, or maybe only once: What happens and what goes wrong?

You don’t realize until you’ve gone through it. There are five primary things that CEOs and CMOs get wrong until they have gone through a rebranding process.

They underestimate the strategic impact.

They treat rebranding as a superficial marketing or design update, instead of the critical strategic business transformation that redefines their entire organization.

They’re not recognizing the emotional complexity of a rebrand.

They underestimate the emotional challenges that they will face for all stakeholders, internal and external. Rebranding means letting go of your established identity and stepping into uncertainty and change.

They are not allocating sufficient time and resources.

They rush the process, failing to give the rebrand the necessary time, attention and investment for deep alignment and lasting impact.

They miss the opportunity for internal alignment.

They overlook the importance of engaging all and aligning all employees whose buy-in is essential in this new brand direction. They miss the opportunity to strengthen, expand trust and connection both internally and externally.

They have a fear of losing approval instead of owning their own identity.

This new identity. They worry too much about losing stakeholder approval, rather than confidently embracing and communicating their unique value in the marketplace.

So let me tell you a story about a client who had never gone through a rebranding process.

This was a merger-acquisition. There’s always a lot of pressure in merger-acquisitions. Time is always, you know…there’s always a tendency to rush everything. And I think when we started using the framework, there was a lot of misalignment between how they were going to combine services and who the new audiences were.

What did that look like? So this process, as we went through the framework, gave them at each stage more and more clarity for the business decisions they needed to make that they hadn’t. I understand that, especially in a merger-acquisition, you’ve taken so much time to get to this point that you really want to kind of get to this next stage.

But without using a framework and going through these clarity steps, you undermine all of the investments you just made.