Thinking of changing your Brand Name? Here are the pros and cons..
Tags: Rebranding, Branding, Entrepreneur, Startup, Business

Brand Management

When you’re originally starting up, the name that you want for your company may already be taken. But the bigger challenges are:

Is the name unique? Does it easily relate to what you do? Can it become a global brand? Is it meaningful, so others will care? And, is it cool enough?

Many startups do not spend a lot of time on the new name beyond articulating which domain name is available. And sometimes it is difficult to see that long-term vision of where you want to be, when you are starting up in a garage with your trusted friend.

There is nothing wrong in getting started quick and then revising your brand strategy. Blue Ribbon Sports did not have the resources, nor the far sight of becoming the global brand that it is today, Nike.

Here are some pros and cons of re-branding.

Pros

Improve Your Brand Positioning

A meaningful brand positions itself so that it is always true to its positioning and clearly states which values and beliefs are at its core. Take a look at your closest, best performing competitors. Crawl their websites and publications and list their USP’s, mission and vision statements, core values and taglines. Strategically rebranding your startup with insights into your best performing competitors will give you an extra edge and influence how you craft your messages and shape your brand image to be more attractive and meaningful.

Support Brand Recognition

A rebrand is also great opportunity to introduce, re-connect and develop stronger relationships with your customers, consumers and partners. This is especially true because trust and reliability are important factors when doing business with someone else. With your new name or logo, you have an opportunity to refine your storytelling and create new or improve existing mental associations to be more positive or stronger.

New hires and layoffs

Rebranding can be used as an excuse to let go of some people who were not ideal for a startup environment. Also, hiring new people who fit in better with longer term strategy helps way too much. This acts as a big change for an organization.

Cons

Hate mail and losing loyal customers

Nonetheless of any fact there are exist for Startups a bunch of loyal customers. Some of them didn’t like the change since they could no longer identify themselves with the new name. From some of these, you even get some hate mails. For most of the customers who email, you must get back to them promptly and won them back.

Confused Employees

The rebranding puts sales teams in utter confusion. It is for them to explain the change to their clients. Moreover, planning this change for around the month, they always question if they should talk to new client prospects. It really takes a lot of perseverance for this task to be aptly executed.

Complicated process

Rebranding has to be done in a single shot. You can’t take too many days to do it. Once you start creating a list of things which would need to change, it easily seems to run into a couple of dozen pages. Paying attention to the smallest details is important. But what is more important is that all of these changes have to made overnight, without breaking down any of your essential services. This means a lot of preparation and testing to make sure everything is right. In this, there is no room for getting anything wrong at all.

About the Author

This article has been co-authored by Harshit Parekh, Co-Founder, Director at LegalNow. Harshit has written this article from his years of entrepreneurial experience and how he and his family managed to revamp their family business’ brand strategy.