Introduction
A strong brand with a consistent message and a unique identity: that’s what you need to draw in consumers and keep them. However, over time, consumer wants and needs change. Your brand must adapt to market trends.
If you need to engage in brand revitalization, where do you begin? Here, we’ll cover the basics of re-branding strategy, including:
- Gathering consumer insights.
- Visual elements of your brand.
- Packaging redesign.
- Messaging and brand voice.
- Adapting your products to the times.
- Rolling out your rebrand.
If you’re ready to redesign your brand strategy, read on.
The Foundations of Re-branding: Research and Strategy
At the core of re-branding lies market research. Knowing your market and how it is changing allows you to align your re-branding with the wants and needs of consumers, attracting new customers and maintaining existing ones. If you are re-launching a CPG product, research can give you the roadmap to better brand strategy.
Market research saves you time and money. By understanding your target audience, market trends, and your competitors’ products and brand strategy, you gain more direction on what you need to do to create a successful brand redesign. Market research can help you:
- Understand the emerging needs of your customers.
- Be adaptable, lowering risks to your business.
- Learn what messaging will help make your brand attractive to consumers.
- Create offers that go beyond those of your competitors.
- Know what is working for your audience so you can lean into that.
Leveraging Consumer Insights for Re-branding
In addition to learning about your current and potential customers through market research, you can also gather direct customer feedback and engagement metrics to see what is actually working for your CPG re-branding. This can give you quick feedback on what your customers currently like and dislike about your branding.
Customer feedback can tell you about:
- Problems with your branding strategies.
- The concerns of dissatisfied customers, and how you can remedy them.
- How you are meeting the needs of happy customers, and how you can keep them happy.
Your business can gather customer feedback in many different ways, such as form-based surveys, app-based surveys, customer satisfaction score surveys, exit surveys, website widgets, and customer interviews.
You can also gather information that is critical to your brand revitalization by looking at customer engagement metrics. Metrics can help you determine how your brand is doing and how it could change, and how customers are enjoying the changes you have made. There are many metrics that you can track to help guide your brand strategy. These include:
- The Net Promoter Score, which measures your customers’ trust in your products and their willingness to recommend them.
- The Customer Acquisition Cost, which examines the costs of acquiring new customers compared to the number of new customers.
- The churn rate examines the number of customers lost in a certain period, and it can give you a heads-up that your customers are beginning to express dissatisfaction.
- The Customer Satisfaction Score helps you understand how well your business retains customers and how likely they are to purchase products again.
Key Elements of a Rebrand
What do you need to think about when you are rebranding? If you are not changing your product substantially but are instead looking for brand revitalization, you can change:
- Your logo, which is an expression of the core focus and values of your organization.
- Your color scheme, which attracts different customers depending on its design. A change from bright colors to muted natural colors will draw in a different audience.
- Your messaging. What are you saying, and who are you speaking to? This might include tag lines or common phrases that you use when talking about your product.
- Your brand voice. This isn’t what you’re saying - it’s how you’re saying it. For instance, if you want to be casual and personable, then you can adopt that brand voice. Be consistent about this throughout all of your online and in person branding.
- Packaging redesign is an essential part of CPG re-branding. For example, you might redesign your packaging to be easier to open and more accessible to parents of young children, the elderly, or people with disabilities, target audiences who might have difficulties opening your products.
Innovating the Product Line for Relevance
You’ve considered how to make your packaging, logo, and even your brand voice alight with a new, revitalized brand identity. Now, consider how you might explore product innovations that align with this new identity. What approach should you use to add new products to your product line?
Your approach can parallel the one that you used for your overall brand revitalization. Consider what your customers have been saying to you through feedback and metrics, then use that information to create products that meet their needs.
For example, if your company sells body products and customers are expressing a need for more natural products, you could create a product line that is focused on natural beauty and body products.
Implementation: Step-by-Step
When you are rebranding, what do you need to do?
- First, collect information. Do market research to understand the needs of your customers.
- Look at customers’ feedback and customer metrics to understand how your current customers feel about your current products.
- Use this information to innovate. Consider changing your logo, colors, messaging, or brand voice in order to better meet your customers where they are at.
- Go further and create a new product to fulfill your customers’ needs.
- Continue to collect customer feedback and metrics to understand how customers are reacting to your CPG brand revitalization.
Future Outlook
Keeping your brand relevant is an ongoing challenge for businesses. As you look to the future of your company, consider how your company’s market research and customer feedback can shape changes to your brand. Adapt to your customers’ needs and wants, and your brand will remain relevant and vital.
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