How to Know If it's Time to Rebrand Your Business

Rebranding a business can be such a tough decision. It's a little bit like when your favorite shirt has become too worn out and too tight, and you know that it's time for an upgrade.

What's more? If you spend every waking moment managing your day to day business, you'll find that it's quite easy to miss the opportunity for a decent brand shake-up.

When you rebrand your business at the right time, it feels like breathing new life into your marketing, helping you reconnect with customers that have lapsed, and widen your base to reach an entirely new marketing segment.

Launching a rebrand when you don't need it, can cost your business a pretty penny, and it may even impact your sales and marketing.

For this reason, it's very important to consider your rebranding moves very carefully, and make sure you're launching your rebranding campaign at the very right time. Let's look at 5 key signs that say it's time for you to rebrand your business.

#1 You're not attracting the right market

If you started your business the right way, chances are, you have a highly specific target market at the start. However, as you kept going, you've found that this market was not as interested in your products and services as you first thought. Or maybe they are, but the price point is wrong for them.

Perhaps your target market was too broad, and you actually need to aim for several sub-markets that you're now very aware of.

Rebranding is a great way to inject something fresh into brand personality. You can even appeal to your original target market while targeting an entirely new one. Sometimes it's as easy as changing up the layout of a website, or printing some new stickers.

Expert brand strategists (like Brand Master Academy) do recommend going the extra mile. Make changes to internal processes and products too.

#2 A certain brand image needs to stay behind

Perhaps you've attracted a type of audience that you don't want to, or maybe you received some negative reviews and a bad word-of-mouth experience in a particular demographic or in a certain part of the internet.

Sometimes, criticisms are justified where you need to move away from and make drastic changes for your business to succeed. And there will be instances when the critics are unjustified, and no real changes to the business is necessary.

However, it's still a great idea to push the rebrand ahead to get rid of the links between bad press and your brand name. Reshaping a brand can help you regain control of how people have been seeing your business.

A very good example of this is Uber's drastic rebranding, with a new logo and everything. They did it with the intention to transform their image from small startup to global transport supplier.

#3 Representing change of ownership or during mergers

If you've purchased a business from someone else, then doing a rebrand so it suits your goals is a wonderful way to claim ownership and align the business with your own objectives.

In the case of a merger, objectives and goals of the fresh entity can be drastically different from your original targets.

Rebranding represents changes in direction, and helps communicate the message of what your business can offer.

#4 An evolving marketplace

There are industries that stay the same forever, and others are in a constant state of change. Competition also drives changes in the marketplace and can force you to react. If you feel like customers are in search of something different than when you first started, it might be time for change.

On a similar vein, if competitors are offering unique propositions that are gaining target market attention, it might be the perfect time to respond with your own new offerings.

Regular rebranding is important to stay competitive and appeal to an equally competitive and changing industry.

#5 You're not getting enough attention

This is a big problem!

If your branding is too similar to your competitors, it needs to adapt to let you stand out from the competition and grab the right amount of attention from your customers. It's possible that competition has developed and grown significantly ever since your business started, or maybe you just haven't given your branding enough thought.

In any case, blending in with your competition is a surefire sign that you need to do some rebranding. Search for a way to appeal to your ideal market while staying authentic with your brand identity.

Don't make the mistake of standing out from your competitors while forgetting who you are. Think about your unique selling points.

What are products or services that you offer and your competitors don't? What makes you better and what makes you different from them?

Answering these questions need to form the basis of rebranding. It tells your customers and potential consumers why they must choose you over the competition. Plus, it delivers strong results in the long-term too.