Step 8: Realign your brand to keep it current
When you hear people talk about their (or your) need to rebrand, think long and hard before tuning into the conversation or signing them on as your branding consultants. In all but the most extreme cases, when people talk about rebranding what they really need is a brand update, also called a brand refresh or a brand realignment.
✔ Rebranding involves abandoning the essence of what a brand stands for and starting from scratch to build a brand new brand. Rebrands are rare and costly and should be approached only with the greatest of care. Chapter 16 can help you make the decision.
✔ Brand realignments begin with recognition that your brand is the essence of what you or your business stands for. You can’t just change essence; you can’t just change your brand. What you can (and should) be willing to change is how your brand is presented. Market trends and conditions change. Purchase behaviors change. Design looks or cultural aesthetics change. When they do, brand realignments refresh your brand by updating its look and message – but not by changing the essence of the brand or the brand promise.
Here are some examples of successful brand realignments and rebranding efforts:
✔
✔ Rebranding: Responding to environmental concerns, British Petroleum changed its wordmark to the initials BP to signify Beyond Petroleum. It also unveiled a logo featuring a bursting flower, explaining that the changes reflect “the revolutionary quality of our business.”
When and if your brand presentation gets out of step with its market, work hard to keep the brand esteem you’ve carefully built as you refresh and realign your brand presentation to match the market’s evolving interests.
The branding process at a glance
If you’re a visual person, Figure 2-2 lays out the branding process in a diagram that presents the eight steps involved to develop a brand from the essence of a vision to an understanding and preference that results in choice, marketplace esteem, and greater success.
© Barbara Findlay Schenck
Figure 2-2: The branding process at a glance.
The verbal and visual relationship between your business brand and your product brand – also described as the relationship between your parent and subsidiary brands – is called brand architecture. Most brands follow one of two types of brand architecture:
✔ Master (or parent-dominant) brand architecture, resulting in a branded house
✔ Multiple (or product-driven) brand architecture, resulting in a house of brands
The following sections describe each category.
Master brand/parent-driven architecture: A branded house
Adopt a master brand strategy if any of the following situations apply to your business:
✔ Your business has a modest marketing department and budget. If your resources are limited, build one strong parent brand to represent your core business and then introduce each new offering under the umbrella of your business identity. By doing so, you eliminate the need to create and manage the identity of multiple self-standing brands, which requires an intense investment of time, people, discipline, and dollars.
✔ All your products support your business brand image and promise. For example, if your business brand issues a promise to deliver top-tier quality to the most discerning customers, you can’t introduce a product that serves the bargain-basement market.
✔ You want to heighten the value of your business brand as part of a long-term plan to prepare your business for growth or sale. Parent-dominant products enhance the equity of the parent brand.
Unless you’re a deep-pocketed megamarketer, your brand will probably fall under the category of master brand/parent-driven brand architecture. We feel so strongly about the practicality of creating a single brand that we dub it the Rule of One. Heed the rule by building a single business brand. If you decide you need to brand individual products or services, build parent-endorsed subsidiary brands under your single, strong business brand.
Multiple brand/product-driven architecture: A house of brands
A multiple or product-driven brand architecture is used by companies that offer a range of products within a single or various market segments. For example, Tide and Pampers are among major brands owned by Procter & Gamble, yet P&G is virtually invisible as each brand is presented to consumers.
A subbrand, also known as a parent-endorsed subsidiary brand, is a brand that’s closely tied to a parent brand but that has its own identity and values, which distinguish it from the attributes of the top-level brand. If that definition confuses you, imagine what the concept of a subbrand does to the consumer!
Often a brand introduces a subbrand as a way to offer a lower-priced line without harming the esteem of the top-level brand; Four Points by Sheraton and United Airline’s Ted are examples of subbrands.
Coauthor Bill Chiaravalle tells his clients to proceed cautiously with subbrands. For one thing, brands (whether top-level brands or subbrands) need esteem to succeed, and it’s hard to build esteem out of an identity that begins as subordinate to something else. For another thing, subbrands confuse consumers and weaken brand management.
Bill goes so far as to say that there’s really no such thing as a subbrand, at least not in the consumer’s mind, which is where brands live. To the consumer, a brand is a brand, not a subset of a brand. As a brand manager, you should look at it the same way.
Bill’s stance is reinforced by plenty of other brand thought leaders. James Burgin and Jon Ward, coauthors of Branding For Profit (Trump University Press), put it this way: “When it comes to brands, the consumer can only count to one.” In today’s overloaded marketing environment, the human mind takes in and remembers only so much, including one brand at a time.
For example, the consumer sees Diet Coke either as its own brand or as a flavor variety of the Coke brand, not as a subbrand of Coke. Likewise, consumers see Jetta and Passat either as their own brands or as flavors of VW.
The consumer keeps it simple, and as a brand manager, you should, too. When developing the branding strategy for a new product, rather than creating some second-cousin-once-removed relationship, ask “Does this product fit best as a flavor or variation of our established brand? Or does it have a unique enough set of attributes, or fit into a unique enough product category, that it should live under its own brand?” In any case, consider “subbrand” the wrong answer.
Multiple brand or product-driven brand architecture is the most costly branding strategy. You need to build a strong, stand-alone brand for each and every product, plus you need to build a corporate or business brand that carries its weight in the financial