5 Lessons from Rebranding in 2020
by: Nicole Kealey, Chief Strategy Officer at Alida
Three weeks ago, Vision Critical became Alida. For twenty years, Vision Critical has helped clients find their customers’ truth by uncovering rich customer insights. Rebranding to Alida represents how we’re now helping our customers turn that truth into action through the world’s first CXM and insights platform.
There have been many highlights and lessons during our journey of becoming Alida. Reinventing ourselves in less than 9 months and doing so during a pandemic while working 100% remotely was a challenge in itself. But for us, change was essential. It had to be done, not just for the company, but for our employees and customers alike.
Was our rebrand a success despite the unprecedented challenges? Most definitely. What did we learn along the way? Here are the top 5 lessons:
1) Support Has to Come From the Top
Rebranding is a significant change management initiative that involves the entire company and requires strong sponsorship and leadership from the top. Your CEO must be 150% onboard and supportive of every single aspect of the rebrand process. Gratefully, we had that with our CEO Ross Wainwright.
2) Define the ‘Why’ Before the ‘What’
Discovering the purpose of your company and understanding why you need to rebrand before undertaking a rebrand is crucial. Reasons companies rebrand include:
- Repositioning / Changing markets
- Reputation challenges
- New leadership
- Outdated Image
At Vision Critical, we wanted to signal a comprehensive change to the market, our business strategy had evolved, we had new growth ambitions and our brand values felt out of step with the company we had become. All of these elements pointed toward the need for a complete rebrand.
It’s essential to have a strong foundation for a brand before beginning to entertain ideas of new brand names or visual identities. We began with the foundation of our brand vision: “A world where customers are the ultimate source of truth”, and our brand attributes: Bold, Empathetic, Clever, and Fearless. From there, when deciding on any new aspect of our brand’s identity (name, logo, colours, fonts, etc), we would evaluate our choices against our brand vision and attributes. This made it much easier to recognize the elements that fit authentically and those that did not.
3) Pick the Right Agency Partner
Like any successful relationship, the right partner has to be a fit on multiple levels. While experience and professional expertise are important criteria, there must also be strong alignment between your company’s leadership and the agency. We found this and more in our brand agency partner, The Garden.
We wanted a partner that would challenge us to think differently and explore out-of-the-box approaches. Because of the strong alignment we established from the onset, there was a high level of trust in their recommendations, ideas and points of view. The mutual trust we built allowed all of us to share our feedback and ideas freely...more