By: Chris Piehler
Okay, so you’ve asked yourself the five essential questions and decided to embark on the voyage of rebranding. You’re fully aware of how updating your website can be like remodeling your kitchen. You’ve marshaled all of your edtech marketing know-how and creativity. After weeks (or months) of work, you’ve finished a strategic overhaul of your website, then created new logos and new collateral and sent them out into the world and…nothing.
Or worse, your clients or prospects actively dislike your new branding. How will you know if someone thinks that the font you considered elegant would look at home on a toilet paper wrapper? In today’s “post first, think later” social media atmosphere, if someone objects to any aspect of what your company does, you’ll know. And so will thousands of their friends.
But don’t despair. Like any other edtech marketing project, rebrands sometimes don’t have the intended effect. Here’s our simple, five-step guide to making delicious lemonade from the lemons of a failed rebrand.
- Don’t feed the trolls. This may seem obvious, but it bears repeating: do not respond to people who are aggressively negative about your brand online. In this situation, as the wise computer said about both nuclear war and tic tac toe in the movie War Games, “The only winning move is not to play.” You’ve got more important things to deal with than someone with the username AngryMutt who thinks your new logo “sux.”
- Respond to helpful customer suggestions. On the other hand, if you get a constructive comment online, by all means respond by thanking the person who posted it, and make sure to follow up with them if you actually implement a change that they’ve suggested. That’s a surefire way to earn a loyal customer.
- Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you’ve put in the time and effort to rebrand your company and it doesn’t inspire the interest you hoped it would, it’s natural to get frustrated and decide to scrap the whole thing and go back to the old, familiar look and feel. Before you do, take several deep breaths and consider how it would look if you rebranded and then just promptly went back to your previous branding. Instead….
- Pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t. Try to use objective evidence as the basis for your decisions about what aspects of your branding need more work. If you’ve redesigned certain pages of your website and the exit rate on those pages shoots up, then yes, it’s time to make some tweaks. If you change the name of your flagship product and orders plummet, then most likely you should revisit that particular decision.
- See if you have a “Coca Cola Classic” option. If all else fails, remember “New Coke.” When people objected to the subtle tweaks to their favorite cola, the company brought back the pre-rebranding product, called it “Coca Cola Classic,” and sold millions more cans of the same soda that they had been selling under a different name. Coke made so much money from the debacle that a popular urban legend says it was a marketing ploy all along. (It wasn’t.)
The point is this: if your rebrand attracts negative attention, it’s still attention, and sometimes, by admitting publicly that you’ve made a mistake, you can get your customers to see your legacy products in a whole new light. And isn’t that the goal of a rebrand in the first place?
Thanks for sharing!
