Some other benefits are coming from building a strong brand:
- Increase sales
- Lowers cost of acquiring new customers
- Increases customer retention and loyalty
- Attracts talented employees who remain with the company over the long term
Internally you will attract talented employees that vouch for your company. To the outside world, a solidified brand brings more than a service or product. It helps an organization to build a strong bond with customers, partners and other stakeholders. Not only you will be able to attract the right customers but also they will recommend your organization to other potential customers.
“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.”, Simon Sinek
When should you start redefining your brand?
Now if you are at a stage in which you feel that your brand does not help you communicate your values. Or when there is a lack of consistency between what is happing internally in your business and the outside world. These are red flags that warn you to redefine your brand. Besides the reasons mentioned above, what motivates businesses to rebrand is:
- Leadership team changes or there are new additions to the team
- When a business needs a brand makeover
- There are important merger and acquisitions about to happen
- Changes in customer behaviour
- Repositioning a brand to reach new audiences
This is not an easy process as the rebranding itself can involve restructuring some parts of your brand. This will ultimately affect the way you and your team interact and work together.
Why it is important to involve team members to redefine a brand?
When your business has started to grow and you are not anymore at a startup stage, it is crucial to involve your team in the redefining process. You will get an overview of what your team members perceive your brand is what understanding of your values and purpose are.
We have been implementing this workshop in small teams of max 12 people in the SaaS and Coworking space industries. In both cases, the results were remarkable and brought joy and positive results within the team members. They felt there were involved in an important phase of a company´s transition to a well-defined and well-positioned brand.
What a branding workshop looks like?
Our branding workshop is based on Simon Sinek’s gold circle theory that starts by defining the purpose of a company, followed by its vision and values.
That is why we left it at the end of the workshop.
The branding workshop is divided into three parts and each one of them contains exercises to help the team come up with their own version of the statements.
Brand Statement
In this part, we try to evaluate what is the higher purpose a team is working for. To prepare this exercise we start by simply asking the team:
- What the business does
- How it does it
- And lastly, understand the why or higher purpose of their work
At the end of the workshop, the team comes up with its own version of the statements. Their statements provide insights about their brand perception. A business can detect when team members offer a consistent answer or their answers are completely different.
Vision Statement
In the vision statement, we evaluate what is the direction of a company according to the description of the team members. Through a series of questions and exercises, they will formulate their own version of the vision. They will try to predict where the company is going to be in 5, 10 or 15 years.
Company Values
Values are essential when forming a team, adding a new team member or talking to a potential customer. They define when a candidate is a good fit because he/she/it shares the same values or when a customer advocates for the same causes as the business they want to hire.
In this phase, we are trying to see whether team members can identify similar values or where there might be discrepancies.
Results and analysis
With the results in hand, a business can evaluate how far the team is from the reality of the business, whether they feel they are working for something greater than their paycheck or what values do they share.
This gives business-relevant information about their current status of the brand and what can be improved to build a stronger brand.
Conclusion
The work does not end here, there is much more to do to redefine a brand. It is certainly a good step to start with and letting other business stakeholders get involved will enrich their experience and results.
Are you trying to redefine your brand and don’t know where to start? Let us know and we are happy to guide you through the first steps.
