If you want a rebrand to work, you have to engage the whole team.
Here's how to get started.

I'm often brought in to help companies transition from their very first branding efforts to one that's more suitable for the ways in which they're growing:  They may have set up a basic website when they first started, but now they have a few employees, a few big clients, and they need a brand that is a little more polished and sophisticated.

As I've said before, I think that great brands are built from the inside out. The best brands seem organic and almost inevitable, because they're an accurate reflection of the business and of the people who work there.  Which means that when you undertake a 'rebranding' exercise, it's important to engage employees in the process.  

In my experience, the best way to do this is to gather everyone (or key stakeholders, depending on the size of the organization) together for a workshop session (with pizza is best) in which we discuss the functional and emotional benefits of the company and the current brand identity. Employees become invested in the new brand; more importantly, the session can help identify key insights which form the basis of the new brand identity.

Ask for answers to these key questions

It's important that these workshops are productive and don't deteriorate into free-for-all 'brainstorming' sessions which can drone on for ages and don't really go anywhere.  

So we stick to gathering answers to - and controlled discussion about - these questions:

1. What made you choose to work at this company?  What made you apply here in the first place?
2. What's the best thing about working here?
3. Was there a 'deciding factor' in your decision to work here?
4. When you're talking to friends/family, what do you say about the company?
5. When you're talking to colleagues/former co-workers, what do you say about the company?
6. When you're talking to potential clients, how do you describe the company?
7. In your opinion, why is this company better than others in the market?
8. What do you think this company does really, really well?
9. What do you think this company could do better?
10. If you had to come up with 3 words to describe this company, what would they be?
11. If this company was a retail store, what would it be?
12. If it were a product brand, what would it be?  

Depending on the size of the group, this exercise will take 2-3 hours - but will generate a huge amount of internal brand loyalty and investment as you move forward.

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Do great brand stories come from within - or from focus groups?

The other day I had lunch with a big-budget marketing consultant and we got to talking about one of his clients.

"I spent most of last week in focus groups," he said.  "We're rebranding and repositioning the product and looking for insights from our customers as to which way we should go."

It got me thinking:  When you're looking to invent, reinvent, transform or migrate your brand, should your direction come from your employees or your customers?  Should your brand be created from the inside out, or the outside in?

I'm coming down firmly on the side of branding from the inside out.

First of all, you know how I feel about focus groups:  Most people, who don't work in marketing or communications, don't give a whole lot of thought to their feelings about brand loyalty.  That doesn't mean they don't have strong and complex feelings about the brands they choose to buy, use and love - it just means they haven't spent a lot of time analyzing how they got to these feelings.  

People go to therapy for years to understand why they've made various choices in their lives.  It's a bit much to ask them to explain why they're buying your brand of margarine, or how they'd feel about your margarine if you replaced the blue mountaintop design with a green forest design.

Not having your own vision virtually guarantees a parity product.

As a marketing 'expert', on the other hand, your job is to think about your product, the marketplace, the gaps in that marketplace, and more about what's possible than your customer does.  You're supposed to be able to make the creative leaps that non-marketing types can't make.  Most of the time, the customer's frame of reference is only their own limited interaction with margarine or butter-substitutes, so the best they can come up with (at least in a focus group environment) is "Well, I really don't like X...", not "What I've really always wanted is a brand of margarine that made me feel the way Godiva chocolate does, from the purchasing experience to the consumption experience..."

That doesn't mean customers are dumb or unimaginative - it just means that when you rely on non-experts to guide your vision for a brand, you're less likely to come up with the Big Idea that will give you a brand story that stands out.

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