The Brand Growth Gap

Sep 28

Your Brand Needs to Catch up to Your Business: The Leaders’ Guide to Repositioning After Growth

Introduction: Growth creates a brand problem.

Your brand often evolves faster than the market's understanding of it.

You outgrow your market perception. Your target audiences may be stuck on their first impressions, their last interaction, or the mental box they put you in for ease. They’re not paying as much attention to your marketing, social media, press releases, sales outreach, or website as you’d like, so they may have missed the change entirely.

At best, they have only a partial understanding of the evolution.

If you’ve evolved, adapted, grown, or improved, the next step is catching up your audiences. Any change, good or bad – including growth, mergers or acquisition, new products or services, new features, new competitors, new audiences, or a changing market — creates a perception gap.

This gap is between customers’ understanding of your business, and the new reality of what you can offer.

To occupy the right position in the minds of your target audiences, you need to create highly visible signals that communicate a new position in the marketplace. These signals need to be consistent, clear, and concise.

Without updating your positioning through these signals, your marketing and communications will lag behind. This impacts every stage of the customer cycle: awareness, consideration, acquisition, and retention:

Research shows that when audiences understand a company’s business evolution, they’re more likely to buy from, work for, or otherwise support that company. In fact, business leaders who report strong audience understanding of their business evolution are 1.4x more likely to surpass revenue objectives. (Source: Gartner)

You’re pitching from a starting point of the old company and it’s an uphill journey from there.

The best way to change that perception is to evolve the brand in a way that signals a change. A brand refresh can be a highly visible, pervasive signal to your customers that your business has changed and they need to change their perception of you to match. It helps them remember you’re not the old version, you’re new. It may be targeted at your old customers, new customers, or a mix of both.

But it’s essential for communicating the reality of who your organization is today, not what it has been. Otherwise they’ll keep you in the box they first put you in, and not keep you top of mind for the new value, service, or experience you offer.

What are the signals you’ve evolved?

To be clear, these are outward expressions of an inward strategy. Don’t just update these, start with the strategy of what you do, who you do it for, what makes you different, and why they (your audiences) should care. These signals just communicate and reinforce that strategy.

Narrative
Messaging
Tagline
Campaigns
Content
Channels
Experiences / Activations
Logo
Wordmark
Typography
Colors
Photography / imagery

The costs of evolution

Many businesses are intimidated by anything involving “brand.” They think it will hurt their equity and loyalty. They immediately think of rebranding, changing their logo or their name. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about updating how your most important audiences think of you: what you do, why it matters, and how it’s different. The tactics – outlined above – are completely unique to you.

“It will alienate our existing customers;” “It will be too costly;” “It will be too difficult and distracting.”

Here’s our argument against each of these assumptions. Not that they’re always wrong, but they can be.

First, for equity and loyalty, a rebrand is a unique chance to connect with your customers and help them feel like they have a stake in your brand, your business or organization. By involving them in interviews, research, feedback, and launch, you’ve turned them from customers into co-creators. They become stakeholders — literally, they have an “interest” in the success of your brand, whether it’s material or emotional, and that’s a great asset to have.

For costs, working with a small, independent agency like Good Brands can help keep costs low. We use a lean team, keep our process efficient, and structure our partnerships to avoid excessive costs and fees.

And the costs of not evolving could be greater: A study from Boston Consulting Group shows that the cost of regaining lost market share requires a future investment of $1.85 for every $1.00 saved from cuts in brand spending. Building strong brand relationships requires consistent and meaningful investments.

McKinsey found that B2B companies with strong brands outperform weak ones by 20 percent. (Source)

And far from being difficult and distracting, this is an opportunity for growth:

to reevaluate your audience and customer strategy and align the foundations of your outreach and customer experience to your business goals. It’s also an opportunity to get your leadership and team on the same page as your customers, not based on your assumptions, but based on your target audiences’ actual experiences, behaviors, desires, and perceptions.

You’re not alone, either: 84 percent of business leaders and employees report their company’s identity must significantly change to achieve strategic objectives. (Source)

Examples

Case Study 1: International fitness brand

For our client, an international fitness brand, they needed to be recognized for their leadership and expertise in women’s fitness, and to figure out who their audience was.

After decades in business, a lot had changed: trends had come and gone, everything from yoga to pilates, GLP1s, ice plunges, AI, and red light therapy.

Their brand had evolved, but it had gotten to the point where it needed to take a bigger leap forward rather than incremental steps. They couldn’t tell the story of who they are today while still being tied to their old name, story, perception, and positioning. And they needed to stop speaking to themselves, and start speaking to their audiences — an underserved market in the fitness space.

Gap 1: Confused Audiences

They were speaking to past audiences, and themselves — not the audience they should be focusing on.

Pivot: Audience-First Everything

Laser-focus on the needs, attitudes, behaviors, and interests of their niche.

Gap 2: Complicated Messaging

They have a lot to say about a lot of topics. Fitness, especially for their audiences, is nuanced. But by saying everything, the message gets muddled.

Pivot: Tested, Journey-Focused Messaging

A comprehensive messaging strategy, broken down by audience segment and stages of the journey, gives them the discipline to be more effective.

Gap 3: Outdated Name

The fitness industry has evolved. Trends have come and gone, and come back again. They needed to evolve the name to not be limited by it, but without losing equity.

Pivot: Lean into the Nickname

Brand loyalists already used a nickname for the company. We leaned into that by making it the brand name, freeing them from constraints while staying recognizable.

Gap 4: The Experience Missed

With 200 locations, the brand experience varied. Competitors were cutting them off with curated experiences that became a destination of themselves.

Pivot: Strategy Overhaul

A top-to-bottom overhaul of the experience, shuttering underperforming locations and focusing on priority markets with new locations, plus a complete redesign of the in-studio experience.

Case Study 2: The Arbor Day Foundation

After 50 years, the Arbor Day Foundation had changed a lot.

They were no longer just tree planters who sent your grandma a bird clock, or a holiday in April. They’d planted 500 million trees in 50 years. In 2019, they partnered with Mr. Beast and Mark Rober to plant 20 million trees as part of #TeamTrees. They work with corporate partners like FedEx, Verizon, and Salesforce on carbon credits and tree-planting projects. They partner with cities around the world, as well as in the U.S., to certify “Tree Cities.”

Their brand needed to evolve to match their impact, breadth, and mission — and capture new audiences with who they are, not who they were.

Gap 1: Outdated Perception

Too many people thought of the brand as their grandparents’ tree planting group. New brands were emerging and seeming more new and exciting. But ADF is unquestionably the leader in tree planting.

Pivot: Modernized Brand

An evolution of the brand kept the historical equity and legacy alive while refreshing it for new audiences and digital channels.

Gap 2: Complicated Brand Architecture

The Foundation was doing so many things, from helping people plant trees, to massive corporate partnerships, working with cities around the world, to verifying carbon credits. But the fragmented brand architecture meant they didn’t get all of the credit, or connect their partners to all of the work.

Pivot: Brand System

We created a simplified brand system, with a unifying logo and consistent approach, updating and consolidating sub-brands so now it’s one brand family.

Gap 3: Size and Scope Messaging

A good problem: you do so much, and do it so well, but it’s hard to talk about all of that and get people to understand it.

Pivot: A Unifying Narrative

We built the brand around a key audience insight: planting trees brings people together. It’s broadly supported, positively regarded, it’s easy, and it has huge benefits. We built the brand, and all of the complex work, around one simple truth: everyone can do something good by planting a tree.

Close the gap: Align your new position with customers

So, how do you close the gap and get your customers or targets to understand your new brand?

Make sure your new strategy is clearly defined: Define how you’ve changed, and what space you want to occupy and own. Who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why it matters. This could include your brand positioning, core offering, unique value proposition, differentiation, competitive advantage, customer experience, target audiences, and segmentation.
Connect with your audiences: Conduct research, any kind, even if it’s just picking up the phone or reading reviews, but do whatever you can to understand their perceptions of the brand, experiences, and the gap you’re facing.
Refresh the signals: Align the external expression of your brand with the strategy and gap: your narrative, messaging, customer experience, content, channels, brand activations, imagery, logo, typography, color palette, layout, and marketing can all communicate things about your brand, either explicitly or implicitly. After your growth, should your brand feel bigger? More approachable? More trustworthy? More disruptive? More innovative? More premium? These signals can, and do, communicate things like this.

If the perception of your company is still stuck in the past, updating your brand experience and communications to clearly signal your new position will help you be more competitive and effective.