Field Guide to Change Management in Branding
Introduction
Welcome to the Field Guide to Change Management in Branding.
Before you get started, a couple of things to clarify:
First, branding here is a broad category. Your brand is the experience of interacting with your organization. When a customer buys your product, talks to your team, sees your ad, visits your website… that’s your brand. Your logo, your voice, your messaging, all of that are tools to influence what the audience thinks about you, but they work together with every experience and interaction to create an idea of who your organization is in the minds of your audiences – your brand. And your culture is your brand: it influences how your team works together to create those experiences, and how they create the brand experience in their interactions with each other and your audiences.
Your brand strategy sets out the goal for those experiences and what the perception of you will be, and makes a plan for how to get there. It lays out how your logo, messaging, storytelling, and design will work together to create a certain feeling and perception, yes. But if you really have a good brand, it also shows how everything you do — your culture, your customer service, your product design, your service delivery — works together to create that goal feeling and perception.
Next, there are a lot of great change management frameworks, resources, and guides out there. There are 5 C’s, 5 P’s, 7S, Lewin’s, Kotter’s. And these are all amazing resources written by smart people at impressive organizations. We’re not change management experts, we’re brand experts. What we’re doing here is providing our process, which borrows from some of these frameworks as well as our experience, to provide a reliable, proven framework for navigating the change of a brand process. This can be applied to a rebrand, to a new brand, to renaming, a merger or acquisition, a brand evolution, a shift in positioning or strategy, even a new marketing strategy or campaign. Anytime an organization is going through a shift in the brand, this is a helpful way to ensure everyone is bought in.
It’s so important to get this buy-in for two reasons: one, the people within your organization know the brand really well. They know where it’s been, where it is today, and have a sense of where it’s going. The gritty reality of the brand in the trenches, not what’s shared by the CEO or in a quarterly training. Getting their knowledge and insights to inform the brand will make it stronger, more relevant, and more authentic. Second, these are the people who will be creating the brand. That’s right, it won’t be created by the agency, the brand team, or the marketing department. Those groups will set the strategy and provide the resources, but the actual implementation of the brand will be up to the people of your organization. And your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what you do. Your brand is only as good as it’s implemented. If your brand team or your c-suite say the brand is one thing, but your customer service team, your product team, your culture team, etc. don’t follow that strategy, there’s a disconnect. And the actual experience of the brand in the real world is the brand, not some words on a brand guide. Change management is about eliminating any contradiction or gap between those two worlds.
Finally, going through a brand process, however comprehensive or impactful it may or may not be, can be difficult. Sometimes it can be the most difficult things an organization ever goes through. We’ve seen that happen. But at the very least you’re going to face differing opinions, resistance, and strong feelings all around. By now you understand how many parts of the organization brand impacts. You may be changing something that to your team feels is fundamental to the organization, like the name or purpose. Or you may be changing something deeply emotional, like the stories you tell and how people think about you. And if you’re creating a strong brand, you’re changing people’s day-to-day mindsets and responsibilities. So give them some grace, and do yourself a favor and be intentional about how you involve them. Your brand will thank you for it.
With that out of the way, here are the steps of change management for a brand process as we define them:
Plan
Create
Prepare
Embed
Evaluate
We’ll break down the important considerations and tasks for each of these parts of the process in this Field Guide.
Plan
The first part of any brand process is to plan. Not just the timeline and deadlines, but also the stakeholders and strategy behind the process, which aligns nicely with change management. You’ll want to identify the decision-makers who will actually make the final call throughout the process, as well as the influencers who it’s important to have support and feedback from. But it needs to be clear to these groups their roles and responsibilities, because when there’s an impasse, which is not only possible but likely, your brand process will need a tiebreaker to actually make a call (the decision-makers).
Next, you’ll want to identify the incentives for each of these groups, as well as any blockers to the process. What do your decision-makers and influencers care about? What does success look like to each of them? What is going to motivate them to participate and give their time?
What are the blockers to the process: people, obstacles, logistics, budgets, time or resource constraints, etc. Know what these are, and have a plan for addressing them. Next, you’ll want to have a plan for momentum: what tactics will keep the process going, keep people motivated and engaged, and create excitement for the change? What are the milestones along the way that can create momentum, as well as ensure success? And finally, what does success look like – not only for the organization, but for different stakeholder groups, both internal and external? What is your overall goal for the rebrand, and what are the objectives that align to that goal? Putting in time and thought at the beginning of the process will not only ensure that the change is easier to navigate, but also create a strong brand at the end of the process and brand experience going forward.
Create
With a branding process, giving stakeholders and influencers the opportunity to be a part of creating the brand strategy and identity is hugely important for change management. This means involving different stakeholders — or representatives from stakeholder groups — in activities like planning sessions, interviews, focus groups, workshops, iterations on the brand, and feedback rounds. This not only increases their investment and support for the brand, but it also creates a stronger brand by incorporating different points of view in the process.
Again, this is also an important phase where understanding roles and responsibilities is important. While stakeholders’ point of view and feedback is welcome and important, they are not the decision-makers, which may mean that their view is considered but not reflected in the output. This could be for a variety of reasons, and you’ll have to determine how valuable it is to communicate those reasons versus move on. But communicating things like who are stakeholders vs. decision makers, the findings and insights from research, and the strategy for the brand will also help explain why the brand ended up and allow influencers to reach their own understanding of why their preference or feedback may not be apparent.
As we move into the next phase of change management, Prepare, this co-creation will also help you to plan the assets, resources, and tactics for the brand launch and maintenance, which is invaluable knowledge for strengthening your brand implementation. Asking different stakeholder groups what they need, how they will use it, and how to prepare them is crucial for the planning and creation phases.
Prepare
Throughout the process, communication and partnership are important principles for adequately preparing your organization and network for the new brand. During the planning process, you’ll want to identify the resources, templates, and training tools that your internal team and external partners will need and have a plan for developing and distributing those. The creation process allows you to revisit and validate or narrow that list in conversations with stakeholders.
Throughout the research, strategy, and identity phases, you’ll want to be communicating clearly and transparently with different stakeholders. What this looks like obviously depends on your organization, but here are some ideas:
Share with the organization early that you’re going through this brand process.
Show them you have a plan and are going to be inviting the team to be part of the process.
Determine a way for people to give input into the brand. We love doing internal surveys, where anyone in the organization can weigh in. It makes it easy to sort through a large amount of feedback and identify interesting trends and themes to explore.
Tease the new brand and give the internal team a glimpse before it launches. Depending on your organization, you’ll have to decide the pros and cons when it comes to leaks, but even if you want to ensure nothing leaks you can still share things in a safe way.
Give your team, ambassadors, and advocates lots of resources, assets, and swag. This will make it feel like the new brand, even though it requires change, is actually going to make their lives easier by having more resources backing it.
And inspire them. A new brand should be emotional. It should tell a story, declare a mission, and evoke a vision of the future. People should feel like they’re a part of it and – this is important – feel it. Just as much as you want external audiences to feel your brand, you want your team and partners to as well.
Train them. This is part of the points above, and it may be where a lot of the things in this list happen, but you want everyone in your organization, as well as ambassadors and partners, to be able to clearly, consistently, and accurately explain your new brand. They are going to be the ones responsible for creating it: it succeeds or fails based on how they actually perform and implement the strategy you will have created. Give them all of the tools and preparation they need to do that job well.
Embed
As we said in the intro, a brand is much more than a logo and design approach. The brand strategy is the perception you want to create of your organization, and how you’ll create that perception. It involves emotional and psychological appeals, personifying the brand through a voice and personality, a storytelling and experiential approach, and using things like typography and color theory to reinforce the perception. But it should also include things like the culture and operations of the organization, hiring and onboarding practices, product/service design and delivery, customer experience, environmental and social governance (ESG), etc. As the new brand is developed, consider how the strategic focus of all these areas can shift and work together to create the brand you want. Look at tactical changes in each of these areas that align to the overall brand strategy.
Once the brand is implemented, just like you update your website, social media channels, or marketing campaigns, roll out these new operational practices. Make sure each team and department knows their role in creating this new brand: not just telling a consistent story and creating on-brand experiences in external-facing roles, but working together to actually do what you say you’re going to do in external communications. A brand that claims externally to be ethical or sustainable needs to make sure it behaves consistently in all of its internal operations. HR, Operations, Product Development, Customer Service, etc. all have a role to play in creating a good brand, but those teams may not realize it as intuitively as marketing and communications.
Alignment and consistency is especially important with leadership: senior staff should lead by example, adapting their behavior and performance to align with the brand strategy. Don’t risk hypocrisy and a crisis in your brand by saying one thing and doing another; this change starts at the top.
Evaluate
A good brand is never done. You’ve got a north star to follow, but like any good journey, you’ve got to adapt along the way to the things you encounter. Don’t lose sight of the strategy, but respond to your audiences: their actual experiences with the brand, as well as their values, needs, priorities, etc. should be taken into account. The design, messaging, and voice needs to stay recognizable and consistent, yes, but also fresh.
When you create a brand, customers have an expectation of what the experience will be like. In our brand strategies, we call this a brand promise. As you consistently fulfill that brand promise, delivering the experience that customers expect and that you say you’ll deliver, the benefits are huge: trust, loyalty, retention, emotional resonance. Monitor and evaluate how well you are living up to what you say you’ll do and the promise you’re making your customers.
You’ll also need to monitor and evaluate your brand creators: your leaders, internal team, partners, influencers, and ambassadors. What are they saying about your brand, and how are they creating brand perception? You’ll need to continuously respond, engage with, and equip these audiences. And don’t do it in small gestures; take the time to have big moments as well, where you’re not just rolling out a new message or resource, but reminding everyone of what the brand is and why it matters. This could be an annual brand training or team retreat, as well as more frequent brand content and specific trainings. Help your brand to stay healthy and strong with sustained efforts, big and small.
About Good Brands Creative
Good Brands Creative is a collective of senior brand strategists, creatives, marketers, and designers on a mission to make good brands. Good brands know their audiences, have something of value to offer the world, and tell good stories. Through research, strategy, creative, and marketing, we help brands to be good brands.
