When launching your business in New York City, you may face numerous challenges on your path to success. One of these is the stiff competition in the city’s business landscape. A recent study showed that of the more than 200,000 businesses in the Big Apple, 98 percent are small businesses.
How do you make your brand stand out in such a saturated space? Come up with a fresh take. Rebranding helps change the perception of a business, enabling it to re-establish a connection with the target market.
Contents
Why Rebrand?
Changing your brand can mean different things for different businesses. For one enterprise, it may mean a name change; for another, it could be adopting new colors. You may decide to retain your name and logo but change your slogan. Whichever form your rebranding may take, it’s important to do it for the right reasons.
Some of the reasons include:
- Global appeal– When reaching out to cross-border markets, it’s important to have a brand different cultures can relate to.
- Repositioning your brand– You may want to change your messaging to potential customers to address their needs better.
- Changing trends– You may notice a change in trends that you want to take advantage of to rekindle interest in your brand.
- Changing perceptions– Rebranding can help your business purge itself from a reputational stain.
Rebranding Tips
Whatever the motivation behind your desire to rebrand, you need to ensure the exercise will help you retain your existing business while acquiring new clients. You want to get a strong return on your investment. There are several ways to achieve this, including:
-
Announce the Rebrand
Announcing your rebrand to the world should be the culmination of a well-executed plan to change the perception of your business and the products you offer. When everything is in place, you need to develop a strategy on how you will break the news in a way that won’t scuttle your rebranding effort.
One of the best ways to ensure you don’t alienate existing customers and partners with your new brand’s unveiling is to give them advanced knowledge before announcing it to the general public. Get them excited by ensuring they understand why the change happened and how they will benefit from it.
After you create the new brand, you need to consider all the channels you have at your disposal to reach customers. You can then create a plan for when to execute each stage of the outreach campaign. From this plan, you will know when to reach out to local media for publicity and how you will approach putting the information on social media. To enhance engagement with your new brand, you can run promotions and giveaways alongside informative messages.
Knowing how to plan and execute such a campaign requires a grasp of marketing that may be beyond your scope. You may want to hand over this process to a marketing agency familiar with the NYC market. Such agencies know how to rebrand businesses in a way that enhances their footprint, not diminishes it.
-
Be Thorough
Laying solid groundwork for your rebrand is the key to its success. As you devise the novel image or messaging, you should consider how your brand is currently positioned. Analyze your current brand to establish its strengths and shortcomings.
This information will help your chosen agency as they work out what will work and what won’t in your new brand. Your choice of a marketing agency should be the result of careful consideration. They are responsible for crafting an entirely new image.
-
Consistency is Key
Cohesive messaging and imaging are integral parts of any successful rebrand. You stand the risk of suffering grave reputational damage if the messaging from one channel conflicts with your brand’s core values. When planned and executed meticulously, brand consistency ingrains a singular message in your customers, potential customers, and staff. This will lead them to distinguish you and your products from the thousands of other vendors in the New York commercial space.
This includes switching up your packaging to something that’s more in line with your new brand image. Incorporating subtle yet recognizable changes on custom boxes and packaging will help your customers know that you’re rebranding without it being too sudden.
-
Stay Realistic
As with anything else your business spends money on, your rebranding will have a finite budget. When you’re planning how to bring your message to the masses, you need to use channels that can be effective but will not stretch your budget.
You also need to be pragmatic about how many people will become aware of your rebrand. As a small or medium-sized business, your brand change may not garner as much attention as you hope. While the return on your investment in rebranding may not be immediate, it may bear fruit in the future if you’re consistent.
-
Inform Employees
It is just as important to get buy-in on your rebranding exercise from your employees as it is to get it from your potential buyers. This will give them a sense of ownership in the new brand and increase their willingness to promote it in whatever capacity they have. They should be the first ones to find out about any updates.
Call in the Experts
Coming up with a comprehensive rebranding strategy and painstakingly putting it into motion, measuring the outcome, etc., may be difficult to do. This might be because you have no marketing training. Identify a reputable marketing partner and work with them to develop a plan that covers all the bases and reap the benefits.