A Winning Rebrand, One Step at a Time
It’s not only Hollywood that’s obsessed with reboots – established brands often find it necessary to show a new face to consumers, investors, and competitors. Here’s how to do it right.
At its core, rebranding is all about taking a company in a different direction and then changing their image to reflect it. Companies rebrand for all sorts of reasons – changes in vision, PR disasters, and the need to appeal to new audiences are common catalysts, but one of the most compelling reasons to rebrand is the process of merging with another company. At Argos Multilingual, one of our clients (a large American medical device manufacturer) had spent much of the past decade acquiring other medical device companies. With a slate of new products, new intellectual property, and different markets, the client badly needed to bring all their marketing and branding efforts together under one umbrella. Here are the steps we took to make it happen.
Step 1: Nail down all expectations and goals.
Before you kick off a rebrand, it’s vital to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the rebrand and knows exactly why it’s happening and what’s expected of them. You’ll also need to define factors like timelines, budgets, and any changes to the product offering. In our case, the client’s goal was to update all the content for all the acquired products from the project management and desktop publishing (DTP) perspectives and merge everything under one brand. This involved dealing with 20 to 30 different languages, depending on each product’s distribution markets. It was a tall order, but we felt confident given our track record and the quality of our specialists.
Step 2: Devote the necessary resources.
You need the strongest team possible to pull off something as intense as a rebrand. This might involve re-prioritizing or putting other work on hold, as resource allocation is not the place to cut corners! For us, the key was having a dedicated project manager for the client who was able to work full time on coordinating all rebranding projects from the client side as well as from the translation production side. That meant discussing exceptions, monitoring deadlines, and shifting projects between departments.
Because our client didn’t want to change any of the documentation from the newly acquired companies, we devoted a specialized desktop publishing (DTP) team to deal with the files from the acquired companies. These files were in a multitude of different formats, so our team developed custom tools to prepare documents more efficiently, applying them to areas like brand colors, company information and product part numbers, and PDF generation. The icing on the cake was applying DTP quality assurance and its automated quality checks to the workflow.
Step 3: Make sure content stays king.
A primary benefit of rebranding is the “opening up” of all your content, allowing global updates and publishing to take place while the rest of the branding changes are being made. It’s a great opportunity to take a deep dive into what you’ve got and make it more compelling with focus keywords, while also looking for easy SEO opportunities. In our case, the client had an opportunity to make updates to content related to the acquired companies while the documents were being processed from the DTP side. The product disclaimer, for example, had to be changed in all the documents and translated into all the target languages in order to stay compliant – a process that really gave our DTP specialists a chance to shine.
With the right partner in your corner, a rebrand doesn’t have to be an ordeal. There’s a reason why companies from a wide range of industries choose Argos Multilingual to lead them through the process. If you’d like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
