Changing Your Brand Is Never Easy. Can We Help?
Here at Simon Associates Management Consultants, because of our experience and expertise in helping companies change, we often find ourselves faced with two interesting, related, yet quite different challenges:
- Rebranding an Existing Company. This typically comes about with larger corporations that are beginning to change—either a product or the company itself—and need to explore new market segments or new business opportunities. For them, the challenge is how to secure and leverage the power of their former brand(s) as they migrate into new markets. Or should they use the old to enter the new?
- Creating a Brand Story for a Young Company. This challenge is often associated with emerging companies that are out of the start-up phase and moving fast into a period of growing revenues and seeing profits. However, they have yet to consider the brand story: how to secure it and how to leverage it.
For change to happen, you have to learn to think differently
Whether what is needed is a clear and powerful re-branding strategy, or an examination of what a company’s first-phase brand story is going to be, the issues are cornerstones of the work with do with clients—namely, helping them “see, feel and think” in new ways.
Three things become important as we help businesses undertake the branding challenge:
- What is the essence of the brand—be it a product or the entire company
- What is the answer to the question “Why You?” How do you differentiate your solutions or products from others that claim to do it in similar ways?
- How are you really “living the brand” so it is not just sizzle but steak? And if you are re-branding, how will your “live the brand” promise be transformed as well?
We help you get to the heart of your brand
At SAMC, our approach is heavily grounded in observational research: culture probes and Innovation Games®, tools to help capture the real meaning of a brand and the story that people associate with it.
For an emerging brand, the internal culture is extremely important to understand what this new or different solution is going to provide as it is crafted from the inside-out.
For those with strong, long-lived brands, the challenge is how to capture its essence and help it evolve into a new form that will mean something in the hearts and minds of its users, even if its name has changed or the brand has transformed.
In our Case Studies section here on our website, you can study several situations that reflect our approach and capture the essence of our brand in helping large and small companies express theirs.
If you are going through serious changes to your business, perhaps we can help you assess your brand and its power today and where to go tomorrow. Contact us.
