“Doing” Re-branding

Sorry bout pic – can’t stop it rotating. Any tips from real bloggers out there?

This morning in Camden (though frankly, it could have been any High Street in the country) a van pulls up. Two fellas get out to “rebrand” a local estate agency.They started with the sign on the right (the one on the left is the “old brand”). By now they’re no doubt having a nice cup of tea down the road.

Which has changed…absolutely nothing. Apart from the signs above the shop (Oh, and some of the documentation the company uses.

But there you go, another company successfully ‘rebranded’. Another day, another dollar…

All too often – it seems to me – we imagine that by changing the way a company looks (or talks) we will change the company’s “brand”. Ad and communications folk are just as bad as the logo-police who seek to impose executional consistency (how something looks). Or the signage gang.

3 things to remember here:

i. Nobody is watching – few of the staff even care that much.
ii. The brand really exists only in the conversations, social lives and shared working assumptions of folk out there (including staff)
iii. The brand is really driven by its behaviours not by its messages or its colours…so if you want to change your reputation, DO SOMETHING, don’t just get the comms boys and girls or the design studio in.

Oh, and it takes a long while for folk to notice and to change their shared assumptions about you, so if you want things to change quicker, I suggest you do something really worth talking about – something ‘remarkable’ as Seth would have it.