Image: iStock
A brand’s lifecycle is never ending.
From building up a brand that is distinctive and resonates with your target audience to staying relevant by adapting to the different trends of the time, being at the top of your customer’s mind demands a more agile brand strategy to keep your presence felt.
The rat race is highly competitive, especially if you’re vying for a position in markets like Singapore. A report by Emplifi saw advertising spend in Singapore surge by 32% in the last quarter of 2021, with a predicted 16% year-over-year increase in the coming years.
With the demands from the top to keep marketing costs optimised, it can be very challenging to stay on top of a robust, yet highly lucrative landscape like Singapore. But instead of pushing all your chips to the advertising pool, have you considered rebranding?
Rebranding isn’t about fixing something that isn’t broken – it’s really to maintain relevance and presence fitted to the market and audience that you’re targeting. Plus, in a competitive market, rebranding can be a good strategy to remind customers of what you’re offering.
Five tips to rebrand successfully
If you're thinking about revamping your brand to stay relevant in a fast-changing market (which we highly recommend, of course), it's important to approach the rebranding process strategically. Here are five crucial tips to help you rebrand successfully:
Perception is everything when it comes to branding or rebranding.
Image: Cloudinary
The whole point of rebranding is to either seize back your share of voice in the market or to emerge relevant to your target audience. The very first step to doing it properly (and successfully) is to look at what people have been saying about your brand.
What do they love about the brand and its experience? Where have you fallen short? With products and services, it is not always the communicated image that shapes a brand, but rather a customer’s experience with your product or service.
While these experiences are subjective, pinpoint the collective feedback and use this as the basis to re-strengthen your existing brand story.
The famous M&M’s rebranding that took a wrong turn.
Image: Famous Campaigns
Be careful about wanting to keep up with the times, and make sure you’re really doing a rebrand for the right reasons. Just because certain values and topics such as diversity and inclusion are of high social importance, jumping on the bandwagon is not the right strategy.
Take the disastrous M&M's diversity rebranding for example; M&M’s have redesigned their iconic chocolate figures in an attempt to promote inclusivity, one of which is by making the green M&M’s appear gender fluid versus its original female design.
This was met with public criticism in what is perceived as unnecessary de-sexualisation of the green mascot.
Staying present and active on social media is important for rebranding. Image: Search Engine Journal
It goes without saying that your rebranding efforts need to take place on social media – or else, did it really happen?
With 79% of Singapore’s population active on social media, your rebranding strategy is only successful if it is activated through a comprehensive social media strategy.
Take a deeper dive here, instead of just focusing on the existing channels where you have always been, understand the local audience and consider niche social media where your rebranding could break into and open up a whole new marketing segment altogether.
A rebranding is a good opportunity to try something new, image-wise. Image: J Hammer Global
One of the most important parts of any brand is how they look. Is your brand aesthetic still relevant to the visual language of today’s audience?
An identity rebrand can consist of either a full rebrand or a partial update. This means that you need an expert to really analyse your existing assets and determine whether your fundamentals like your logo and content elements still make sense to your target audience.
It may sound simple, but gone are the days when Times New Roman is a staple font typeface – nothing should be left behind in a rebranding effort.
Be sure to tell your audience about your “new look” once it’s up and running. Image: Cool Tool
If you think that your audience will immediately notice that you’ve gone deep turquoise versus the usual teal, think again.
Most people won’t even notice these changes unless you spell it out for them. In this case, a rebranding exercise is definitely worth shouting about - you’d want to capitalize on this momentum as a marketing strategy in itself and bring the conversation back to you.
Think your brand is in need of an update? Work with Brandripe!
Remember, a successful rebranding exercise looks at the full picture – from your renewed focal messaging to how your brand now looks like. You’ll need to make sure it is worth talking about, and definitely worth the effort.
This is where a partnership with Brandripe is advantageous.
We are a team of creatives that supports brands from all over Southeast Asia with their brand and marketing needs – like from social media content design to even packaging design. Whatever you need, Brandripe can truly do it all.
An example of Brandripe’s work. Image: Brandripe
For a rebranding to truly happen, you need to consider all your channels and make sure there is consistency across all channels. That means updating everything from your website to social media, and even the physical product packaging itself.
It makes no sense if you’re looking completely different on different channels.
By working with Brandripe, we can help you do all of that – all through a completely seamless, fuss-free subscription model.
Perks include unlimited requests and revisions, a guaranteed 24- to 48-hour turnaround time, and more importantly, no strings attached.
You are able to discontinue your subscription at any time, allowing you to leverage our partnership through strategic timelines that are crucial to you.
Find out more about how we can help you specifically, and how we can get started on your rebrand. Simply schedule a 15-minute VIP demo call with our team, and we’ll guide you through all the way.
Reach out to us today and let’s get cracking!
(Alternatively, you can reach out to us with an initial brief at hi@brandripe.com or ping us via the Chat toggle on our main page)
