So what does your product stand for? When your potential customers see your product, what do you want to have flash in their minds? Do you think that this is happening today or has your brand become old and tired? Maybe it’s time for a bit of rebranding…!
But What Will The Customers Think?
Let’s talk frankly here for a minute: having to go through the effort of rebranding your product is a real pain. I mean think about it: you’ve got all of that time and energy invested in getting your product’s brand to where it is today, and now you want to go and throw it all away?
Well guess what, if what you have isn’t doing it for you, then yes – rebranding is what you need to do. One of the most important things that you’ve got to realize from the outset is that any sort of rebranding effort is going to result in some confusion among both your customers as well as employees of your firm.
There is no such thing as a magical rebranding: you know, you unveil your product’s new “look” and then all of a sudden everyone just instantly “gets” it. Nope, it doesn’t work that way in real life.
You’re going to have a great deal of training to do both inside and outside of the company. However, it will be all worth it if you can get everyone to understand what your product now stands for.
The Problem With Multiple Products
One of the main reasons that product managers have to go through a rebranding exercise is because their product line has grown. The brand that used to work so well when you just had one product to manage no longer does the job. Instead, you’ve got a bunch of products and spin-offs that all need to be clearly branded.
If this is the situation that you find yourself in, then you’ve got a fundamental question that you’ve got to answer: are you going to go with a branded house or a house of brands?
A branded house is the right decision for your products when you already have a strong brand and you want to leverage this strength with a collection of products that are related, but different from the original.
A house of brands is when you create a unique brand for each of your products. This is often the best way to go when your products have very little to do with each other.
About That Logo…
More than any other aspect of a product’s current branding, its logo is often the hardest thing for a product manager to change. The reasons for this are generally more emotional than practical.
Why change your product’s logo in the first place? A couple of suggestions include taking a hard look at it and determining if it holds up in all of the various sizes that it gets reproduced in.
Another point to investigate is to determine if over time your logo has started to look like someone else’s logo just a bit too much. Are your potential customers becoming confused? If they are, then it’s time for a change.
What All Of This Means For You
The last thing that any product manager really wants to do is to have to go back and rebrand their product. It feels like they are throwing away all that they have worked so hard to achieve. However, sometimes it’s the right thing to do.
Rebranding can be a powerful solution to a lot of common problems that product managers run into. These problems can include issues such as an explosion of multiple products as well as a logo that no longer does the job.
Biting the bullet and deciding to launch a rebranding program is one of the toughest decisions that a product manager will every have to make. However, once it’s done and you start to see just how much more clearly your product is able to communicate its value to your potential customers, it will have all been worth it…
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™
Question For You: When in a product’s lifecycle do you think that a rebranding program would not be worth it?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
So there you are product manager, sitting on the top of the world in charge of the #1 selling brand of coffee and you’re pulling in something like $4 a cup. Then all of a sudden: blam! The global economy falls off a cliff and suddenly there are a whole bunch of competitors who start to poach your customers by offering premium coffee at a much lower price. What’s a product manager to do?