Seven signs you might need a rebrand (and three signs you don't) PART 1

Suzanna McGloin

Oct 1

4 min read

Updated: Oct 3

Many rebrand conversations start with a logo someone no longer likes. That's not the right place to start. You need to look at your business more holistically to decide whether a rebrand is really what’s needed. The signals you’re looking for show up across your business, in your pricing, your sales cycle or your win rate.

But what is a rebrand anyway?

It’s probably worth defining what a rebrand is. And it’s not a new logo. It's your positioning, what you do, who for, and why it's worth more than the alternative. Your brand is the strategy. The logo, the visual system, is how you transmit it. If your positioning is sound and only the execution has drifted, you may not need a rebrand. Save your money, but I'll come to that later.

When I led marketing at the Institute of Directors (IoD), the world's most respected organisation for supporting and training business leaders, I tried to get to the bottom of why our membership numbers kept dropping. Why it was getting harder to recruit new members. To be fair, I had a good idea, but I needed the data to back it up and a baseline measure. A brand survey gave us what we needed. We were seen as outdated, unwelcoming, old-fashioned, male, pale and stale. It felt like a knife to the heart. We knew we needed to do something. We also knew we weren't changing the logo.

The IoD’s logo is iconic, designed by the famous Alan Fletcher - designed to remind us that it was always the Director before the Institute! But we reviewed everything else, the kind of events we ran - out with the rugby dinners - in with the Women in Business lunches. We redesigned the Directors’ room and The Brasserie to make them feel far more contemporary - albeit within the strict confines of a Grade 1 listed building.

We dropped our signature black from all our marketing and the flag outside 116 Pall Mall became teal; today it’s pink! We reviewed all our photography and created a new membership category, IoD99. It cost £99 and was strictly for under-25s. We got over 2,000 young entrepreneurs signed up. We championed mental health in the workplace long before it was a thing, and slowly but surely we started to see the numbers move. People were more positive about us. Retention numbers began to steady. What we did day in and day out, month after month, moved the needle. We were careful and deliberate in what we did and said, and where and how we showed up. We successfully rebranded, and all without a new logo!

So you suspect you might need a rebrand, but you’re not sure what you should be looking for? Let's review the the key signs...

1. Your team can't clearly explain what you do

It happens slowly. You add a product or two, then a new market. Then a line the CRO likes that helped land a big deal. And slowly the story frays, dissolves into 100 different stories.

Try this test. Ask five people from five different teams (sales, finance, customer success, HR, and someone who joined in the last month) to describe your company in one sentence. Ask them separately. Then read the five sentences side by side.

If you get five statements that all roughly say the same thing, you have more of a messaging consistency problem, often fixable without a full rebrand. If you get five sentences which describe five different companies, your brand story has got lost. That's a positioning problem, and it's the root of several of the signs that follow.

Take The Ambassador Platform, a scrappy SaaS scale-up selling into universities globally. When I joined as Marketing Director, the messaging and positioning clearly needed work. I won't pretend I loved the orange branding; it was very Marmite, but it was distinctive, and distinctive is worth a lot. The founders knew the brand needed attention, but there was no budget for a design agency.

So I started with the diagnosis, not the design. I interviewed key people across the business and asked each of them the same question: in one sentence, what does The Ambassador Platform do? The answers varied, but they mostly pointed the same way. That told me the story wasn't missing; it was just unfocused. A sharpening job, not a rebuild.

The real work was reframing the category. The team believed they were creating a new one, which sounds exciting but makes you harder to buy and needs significantly more budget to make work. I could see they were already operating in a category buyers were already searching for, so I repositioned us into that category. From there, I drilled into the specific value the platform gave customers, working with the founders to articulate what made the platform unique. From there, I built a consistent brand platform and messaging, and rolled it out across the website, marketing, and sales materials.

Through a clearer story and a consistent message about value and difference, we doubled revenue in one year, leading to a successful company exit.

2. Your pricing comes under pressure

First and foremost, a brand's core commercial job is to protect price. When it stops doing that, you feel it in two ways. First, you start losing deals on price to competitors you know have an inferior product. Second, your sales team comes under increasing pressure to offer discounts.

A strong brand protects your margin by reducing price sensitivity. A 2016 study by Prof. Berk Ataman and team analysed 7 years of data on 350 brands across 39 categories and found that advertising reduced price elasticity, with the effect being strongest for niche brands or more expensive categories [1].

PwC's trust research found that around 28% of consumers will pay a premium to buy from a company they trust [2], and in B2B, that trust is carried largely by the credibility of the brand and the seller before a conversation with sales even starts. A rebrand that restores pricing power isn't a cost; it's revenue protection.

If you'd like to find out if your company might need a rebrand, or not, you can check for the signs using our Rebrand Diagnostic.

Rebrand Diagnostic

PART 2 Comming next week.

Notes: