Basic rules before you start branding your business

In one of my talk back in 2016, I remembered this participant asking a question during the Q&A session. “Mr Gan, we’re an OEM manufacturer for cleaning products, after more than 10 years in business, we want to do a branding exercise, can you advice what factors we need to consider during this exercise?” I then asked, “any specific reason why you want to re-brand your business?” She then replied “Because when we started our business 10 years ago, we were small and we didn’t have a website, and our logo was very simple. In this era, if we want to stand out from the competition, we need to have good branding…”
Does this sound familiar to you? Most of the time, when an existing business want to do a branding exercise, the reason is rather simple, “we need to…” In my opinion, this sounds more like “they want to…”
Let’s just ask a very simple question to begin with. “What is the single most important reason why you want to re-brand your business?” Will you do it when your business is growing well? Will you do it when are leading the market and your next best competitor is way behind you? Will you do it when your capacity is already fully occupied, even till the end of next year? Precisely, when you are doing so well, the re-branding exercise is not supposed to be your priority.
Let’s try to ask the same question in the opposite way. “When your business is not doing well, is re-branding the way to rescue your business?” Yes? No? or Maybe? The major challenges to SMEs today is not how the re-branding exercise should be done, but whether is there a need for such exercise.
Re-branding exercise (usually in a bigger corporation) is done for a strategic reason, this is often in line with the change of business direction/strategies. Besides the change of logo (which is what most people noticed), they always bring in changes that affect many business divisions and functions (unfortunately, the general public don’t get to know about these details). So in short, a branding exercise is not just about changing the company logo, renovation of offices and printing of new company uniforms, it’s done with lot’s of thought and changes that aren’t superficial.
Thus, for the SMEs, can we do re-branding? Sure we can, but before that, we need to firstly look into the following.
1. Will you be able to tell a story that touches your customers?
Just imagine two simple tagline “we want to be world number one” and “we want to serve our customers better”. Which one do you think your customers are more connected to? Do you think your customers care whether you are number one or number two? So if your re-branding story has nothing to do with them, will they just buy from you because you are world number one? Changing your logo and images probably give some positive impacts if you are in consumers products, but it can be a double edge sword too. There are instances where a re-branding exercise has captured new customers but at the same time loss some existing customers. So if you can’t tell a great story, don’t simply re-brand your business.
2. How much budget you have allocated to this exercise?
Changing the logo and images is not expensive, but for you to communicate and reach out to your existing and potential customers can cause you a bomb. Most SMEs exhausted their budget to create new logo, new office, uniform, stationery, websites and are left with not much budget for others. To make re-branding effective, public relations and advertising cannot be saved, what’s the point of making good changes when no one knows about it?
3. What do you expect as an outcome?
You found a good reason to re-brand your business, but how do you know whether you have spent it wisely or how do you know the money spent did not go wasted? If your re-branding exercise aims to increase sales, make sure you track your sales performance after the exercise; likewise if your re-branding exercise is to boost up the morale of your employees, keep an eyes on their attendance, turnover and productivity. Do not just do it and be happy with all the nice photos and videos.