Podcast Summary

In this episode, branding experts explore the strategic side of rebranding, emphasising the need for clear business objectives, thorough brand diagnosis, and strong internal alignment. They discuss why cosmetic changes fall short and how engaging stakeholders across departments can drive long-term success. With a focus on meaningful metrics and an iterative approach, the conversation offers practical advice for companies looking to rebrand with purpose and impact.

Key points

  • Rebrand Objectives: Rebranding should be driven by clear business objectives, such as attracting new customers, expanding into new revenue streams, supporting price increases, or improving internal alignment and collaboration. Cosmetic overhauls are often ineffective.
  • Brand Diagnosis: A thorough brand diagnosis is essential to understand the current state of the brand and identify the right areas for improvement. This should involve input from leadership, employees, and customers.
  • Alignment and Integration: Integrating the brand strategy with the overall business strategy and aligning it with internal operations and culture is crucial for successful implementation. Engaging and aligning key stakeholders, such as HR and finance, is critical.
  • Measurement and Metrics: Measurement should focus on business metrics like revenue, margins, and sales cycle, not just marketing metrics. Tracking the right KPIs is key to demonstrating the impact of the rebrand.
  • Iterative Approach: Brands should consider conducting regular brand diagnoses, even if a full rebrand is not planned, to stay relevant and adaptable to evolving market and customer needs.

 

Podcast Transcript:

Transcripts are auto-generated

 

Kiran Kapur (host) (00:01):
This week we're in the fascinating world of branding and particularly rebranding. The advice we have to give is just focus first on the commercial. What is it where you need to fix something and move the dial?

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (00:12):
Rebranding can increase revenue generally by understanding not just the value of design, but the value of relevance and tapping into and understanding what it is about you that people care about.

Kiran Kapur (host) (00:26):
And I'm delighted to welcome to co-authors who've written a book "Rebrand right How to Refresh your Brand and Marketing to Grow Your Business." And we will be exploring that growing your business as a key part of rebranding. So I'm delighted to welcome two co-authors, Rachel Fairley, who is a brand fixer, and Sarah Rob who is the founder of the Brand Strategy Academy. Rachel and Sarah, welcome. Let's start with the overall view of what we mean by rebranding. What I loved about your book is it's very strong on the implementation, so we will get very into the details of implementing. So Rachel, would you mind explaining to begin with what you mean by rebranding?

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (01:06):
So rebrand, the word rebranding, it's really ill-defined so people use lots of language, refreshing, revitalising, repositioning, it's all variations on the re something theme, but for Sarah and I, it's all the same thing. It's all about making positive changes to your brand to strengthen it, to drive growth.

Kiran Kapur (host) (01:27):
Brilliant. And Sarah, one of the things in your book you talk a lot about is the rebrand remit, which was one of those phrases that just jumped out at me. What do you mean by that?

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (01:36):
So you've got to have a remit to do the rebrand, and that remit has to be linked to business growth. The remit shouldn't be just an ego driving a cosmetic change. They want to make their mark on the business a rebrand and making changes because it's costly and because it takes time, it needs to link to a growth objective. And there are four big ones that brands and rebrands can really impact. A rebrand remit can be about attracting new buyers, and that's the fundamental place most rebrands start that there's a desire and a need to grow the business by attracting new buyers. And rebranding can do that job for you. Rebrands can help you stretch into new sources of revenue. So by redefining and rethinking your brand strategy as part of rebranding that can help you define a different category, to enter a different sense of what your brand's all about, to help you stretch into other places to grow.

(02:30):
Rebrands can help you support price increases. And this is one of those major things that brands can really help businesses do that brands are really about higher perceived value and creating a sense of perceived value for a business or a product. And rebranding can really increase that sense of perceived value and protect your price elasticity, help you raise prices without losing share and without using revenue and volume. And the other remit for rebrands that doesn't get talked enough about is its impact internally. Rebrands can really help to bring an organisation and culture together. Often rebrands happen because of merger and acquisitions or this is point in time where a business has done so many mergers and acquisitions that the sum of its parts isn't worth more than the sum of the whole, right? And so there's this need to get people working more collaboratively together, ensure everybody is working in a more efficient way, getting people to really want to stay at the organisation because they understand why they're coming to work every day. So there's four different sort of areas of a remit that a rerun can touch. And yeah, we explore all of those in the book.

Kiran Kapur (host) (03:46):
You do indeed. Brilliant, thank you. So one of the things you mentioned there was not doing a cosmetic overhaul. And I know both of you have worked with rebrands over many years. So Rachel, why do people do cosmetic overhauls? What drives that sort of idea of a rebrand?

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (04:04):
So there's usually a reason that a rebrand is called for, but there is often a misunderstanding about what brand actually is and what job it does. And within businesses it can typically be seen as something that is an investment that's sort of a bit showy rather than something that actually delivers results. And so the challenge is when you are starting a project is whatever reason the rebrand was called for. And it can honestly be for something where you're quite perplexed as to how that even is a reason. But if you embark on a brand diagnosis straight off and return to the table with something which is actually data-driven and holistic and comprehensive and combines desk research and primary research, qualitative, quantitative, and really looks at how the competitors set are behaving and what the analysts say is the future of the industry and where you sit in it, when you come back to the table with a proper brand diagnosis and can actually articulate where the brand is strong and you shouldn't mess with it, where the brand is weak and needs strengthening and where it's missing things completely.

(05:13):
It's a really brilliant way of actually educating the leadership of a business on what brands do, but also what the state of the brand is and set some expectations for what the changes actually got to deliver. And that can often reframe for you the sort of we think we need to rebrand, but then when we look at the actual data we can see exactly what needs fixing and what doesn't. And that is often quite game changing because most C-suite be they finance or execs or whatever, will never have seen a proper thorough brand diagnosis. And it means that when you come back later and show progress, you also have a baseline that everybody has agreed as the baseline to be able to then show the kind of leading indicators of is it working? Isn't it working before you start to see the revenue actually change. So it's quite funny how the conversations often start in one place, but the brand diagnosis can really course correct you all to having a kind of common starting point and expectations

Kiran Kapur (host) (06:19):
Without wishing you to sort of drop any companies in it, can you give me an example of where the conversations might have shifted with a client or with a company thinking that we need to rebrand and then we've moved into something else?

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (06:32):
Let me give you a couple of examples that are really commercial. So for example, there was one company I worked with where if you imagine their store cupboard, sometimes I think about these as sort of like imagine it's a department store, this company has and you open the store cupboard and things are literally falling off shelves. You can't find anything. You sort of sigh deeply as you walk into the room and feel a bit like, oh my god. And the problem that that led to was that because buyers couldn't tell what products were right for them and what went with what and why they should even think about buying, it meant that the sellers were doing the same. A customer would walk through the door wanting one thing and they would get sold a competitor's product by the partners or they would be mis-sold or sold the wrong thing because people just couldn't work out from the portfolio what needed doing.

(07:22):
So the thing that was amazing about that is the conversation was actually kind of there must be something wrong with a brand visually or we're not communicating it very well, but the problem was actually architecture as Sarah said, it was sort of after you'd done all these m and as you play Pacman and you bought beautiful products and you've developed your own, just the sort of chaos of the portfolio, sorting that out actually meant that the pipeline flowed really easily. So one of the big things that marketers often get wrong, and I do say this with a lot of love, is there are things that are easier to fix when you are rebranding. It's actually relatively easier to launch well to engage people in what the brand strategy is for. To even start talking with HR about how you start to change policies and so on.

(08:13):
What's really hard is tackling the commercial problem that often leads to the rebrand in the first place, usually quite tricky, which is why it's a problem. It's messy, different people involved, different things going on where you actually have to influence really well across the business to get other people to change how they behave and take decisions in their daily life that affects the outcome. And sometimes the advice we have to give is just focus first on the commercial. What is it where you need to fix something and move the dial, do that first and then go back and do all the lovely rolling out and fixing the experience overall. So quite a lot of companies get that wrong because it's really hard work, but that's what you want to do first is go after the commercial success.

Kiran Kapur (host) (09:04):
Thank you. And Sarah, one of the things that you mentioned was using rebranding to help you with price increases. Now I know because I hear from the listeners how many of us are very worried about pricing and particularly in the current environment, but know that prices have got to go up and we're going, well, how do I do that? So how tactically can you use a rebrand to justify a price increase?

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (09:27):
Well I think if you just really strip it back to some of the basics, right? And I've done this with teenagers on a course teaching them about branding. If you take a Chanel lipstick and you take the name Chanel off and you put a little logo on there and you say Lippy and you show it to a teenager and you say, how much would you spend on this lipstick? And they say about six pounds, six pound 50, and then you show the same lipstick with the Chanel logo on and it's 36 pounds, 46 pounds, right? So I think the simplest answer is that if you build a strong brand, if you build a strong set of associations in people's minds and a strong set of assets, which are those visual things that trigger those associations, then price increases can come because the perceived value of that product is way beyond the cost of the goods and everything else that you would assume might hold your pricing back.

(10:29):
You just need to flip the example out there of some of the brands in the world that charge an immeasurable amount of money, luxury brands for a product which the costs of goods for which are nowhere near the price charged. So I think there's just, that is the simplest argument I've found to say, look, yes, you can increase prices as long as the value of the brand in people's mind is worth that price increase. And that requires, that's a long-term brand building effort of understanding what it is that's of relevance to the people you're trying to target, making sure that you have a distinctive identity. It kind of following the four principles that we have in the book, the four factors that really make a strong brand cohesion, relevance, ease, and difference and then your prices can increase when that perceived value is there.

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (11:21):
The one thing I would add as well to that is marketing is not actually often in charge of pricing.

(11:28):
I mean it should be right the four Ps it should be, but it's a bit of a revelation. If one of your first conversations when you are doing the brand diagnosis is actually with the finance team to ask them about what is the pricing, how good is the price elasticity, where do we want to get on margin, what are the factors which can drive that? Because it's such a commercial and financial conversation that even if you're not responsible for the pricing, it can help you with finance start to determine some goals for the brand that then require a certain level of investment and also of integration between brand and demand to even achieve that kind of price. And I think that that's a very grownup conversation to have early on.

Kiran Kapur (host) (12:16):
So often trying to get marketing and finance to talk can be like having two warring parties, can't it? They just talk different languages and can be seen to have very different perceptions of very different views. So I'm intrigued. So if I'm sitting in Lippy to use your example and I'm going, "right, I've got to put the prices up", is it branding that will allow me to do that and how,

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (12:42):
Well, I mean that's a very big question, but is it branding that will allow me to do that? So there are tools that marketers have at their disposal to be able to influence that perceived value. The obvious one if we're talking about things like lipstick is design is making, if you have a Lippy brand and your whole identity looks like it's been designed by your nephew who did it with a five, there is a perception that comes with a strong identity. Certainly I've worked with a lot of luxury brands, there's certainly a level of quality that is expected in the product, but that is also expected in the brand. So can branding as in its smallest sense, the application of visual identity and brand identity to the look and feel of the thing that you're trying to market, can that influence perception? For sure it can and both positively and negatively, but really that is kind of meaningless unless you're also tapping into the value of your product to the person.

(13:54):
So the other way that branding and brand strategy and rebranding can really start to move that needle for you is by figuring out, well what is it that's of relevant to this audience? And are we speaking their language? Are we outdated? A kind of classic example, which is the other spectrum to luxury is like Taco Bell. Taco Bell was declining in double digit decline and their rebranding process just showed that they'd lost touch with the kind of cultural relevance of food to the audience that they were trying to attract. They weren't selling anything, nevermind being able to increase their prices, they were in decline. But by going through the diagnosis, understanding and talking to the customers and realising that the cultural codes that they were being driven by wasn't food as fuel, which used to be the kind of platform they were thinking about, but as food as experience. As soon as they sort of understood that shift, then it didn't just change their brand strategy, but it really drove into the experience and different products that they created and that turned around the business and from double digit decline, they went into double digit growth. And so rebranding can increase revenue generally by understanding not just the value of design, but the value of relevance and tapping into and understanding what it is about you that people care about. So

Kiran Kapur (host) (15:25):
I'm getting a real sense of the diagnosis stages being terribly important. One of the things that intrigued me once we were talking before the podcast Rachel, was you said sometimes an enormous rebrand isn't necessary. It can be a tweak. So what did you mean by that?

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (15:40):
So it's quite curious what comes up. So I've had with one brand, part of the issue they had was they didn't actually have enough ingredients in their brand identity. So if you imagine every time they went to do something in marketing or in experience, they had a few of the things that they needed. They had a logo and they had a colour and they had a shape, but they didn't know what the photography should look like. They didn't have a photography style if they were communicating something very technical, they didn't really know how to represent that. They didn't have an illustration style they didn't have, and then they did loads of video, but they didn't have a sonic, they didn't have a way of starting and ending every piece of video that they did. So they actually didn't have enough ingredients. It wasn't that they needed to rebrand, it's that they needed to finish the work on the brand identity off.

(16:32):
Whereas another brand, the problem was actually the integration between brand and marketing. So you had brand doing brand campaigns, spending lots of money on doing TV and radio and so on. But actually all of the things that were appearing on digital were really demand generation and they looked completely different. And each product line did different marketing campaigns that looked different. So if you add that together, then what's really, really challenging, just going back to the pricing point that Sarah was making, is it's really, really hard to charge the best possible price and make the best possible margin if people are really nervous about whether they're going to get it, what they buy. And also people afterwards think, oh my god, oh my god, did I buy the right thing? I'm not sure. Oh, you need them to feel really confident. And so all of that working together because ultimately even if you have different product brands you're buying from one business, it all has to look seamless to the buyer because otherwise it makes 'em nervous, like really nervous. So again, there the brand strategy didn't need changing, the identity didn't need changing, it was the marketing strategy that had to be changed.

(17:52):
And then there's also things like you'll have teams doing experiences, but the experiences don't really match the brand strategy or they don't really match everything else that's going on with the product. So you have to, that's what the diagnosis figures out. If you start coming out and you've got great relevance, great differentiation, but the ease is a nightmare, right? It's hard to buy, it's hard to get a salesperson, whatever. And also the cohesion isn't there. It will come up in the brand diagnosis, you'll see it. And so that's why the diagnosis is important because it can be any part of the strategy and execution that is not working as hard as it should. And you have to know where to put your effort and energy because you don't always need to start at the beginning and work your way through everything. Sometimes it's just interventions.

Kiran Kapur (host) (18:41):
So clearly diagnosis is going to be really important. So Sarah, can I ask you, and I'm sure Rachel will want to interject as well, where if I was sitting there going, "right, I need to do a brand diagnosis", where do you even start?

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (18:53):
Where do you start? Well, you start by looking at what you have already. The last thing you want to do is to recreate pieces of research that costs $60,000 that happened last year. So you first of all start with a deep dive into what does the organisation already have and what do we already know and is that still relevant and pertinent and timely enough that we can still use it? And then you work through there. This is a sequence that you work through that we include in the book that goes through internally first, ensuring you've talked to the leadership team, ensuring you're engaging employees, talking to customers on a qualitative level, then rolling that into a quantitative piece of research to get your greater sense of security in the findings if you can afford it. So yeah, there's a laded way to go through it, but it has to include both the internal and the external, both customers and employees.

(19:54):
You need to be looking and working hard with your team internally. It starts with the business strategy. A brand has to follow the business strategy and that if you don't understand that, then you can't go anywhere. You need to have those conversations straight off with the leadership team to understand where is the business going and how is this brand going to support it? But yeah, you start with what already internally and then work that outwards to customers and ensure that you include employees because it can't just be about what we say outside and then no alignment with who we say we are and how we do things within an organisation. And that's one of the big mistakes people make often and marketers say, oh, I didn't realise you should have talked to HR so early in the process. You're like, yeah, it has to be hand in glove and working together because these two things are indelibly connected. What you say outside has to be delivered from the inside.

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (20:54):
Yeah, it's funny isn't it? Because if you look around a leadership table, you'll see finance and ops and sales and marketing and hr, and one of the things I've learned is when I'm in house and I have a brand team, the team is always really small, as small as I can possibly make it because as Sarah points out, your execution is through the people in the business actually HR as sort of the gateway to that, right? Because you need them to behave and take decisions in a way that actually executes the strategy, both the business strategy and the brand strategy. And so if you look at that leadership table and you come back many months later and go, ta dah, you already know you're going to be sced, it's not going to work because sales can tell you how it is. In reality, working with buyers and customers, customer support can tell you why people are leaving, what's going on, what they love the company for, what they hate it for.

(21:53):
But ultimately you have to be the new best friend of HR. And that's really tricky. I mean there's a lot of brand leaders Sarah and I have talked with where they don't even have access to talk to the people within the business as part of the diagnosis. They are refused entry to surveying employees to find out what they think. And that is a particular concern because so many industries are really looking for very particular talent and you need that talent to find you very attractive. And if you don't speak to the talent in your business to understand why they're staying or why they're churning or why people are not taking up offers, it's really hard. And the other thing that I think both Sarah and I feel really strongly about this is if you make the brand strategy, the experience that customers or clients have, but you fail to make it the experience that the people who work for you have, you are just basically telling them to pay lip service to the brand telling them it's just really messaging for the external world.

(22:59):
It's just a campaign. So you have to fix the experience because what the people in the business do and decide and behave affects the experience and the products and the services that you clients offer. And that is you've got to be in cahoots with HR from the off, but you've got to be talking to all those leaders, engaging them, which is why Sarah pointed out you start from the inside because you have to go to leadership first. You have to get leadership on board and on side so that when they see the diagnosis, they go, oh my God, doesn't surprise me, but it's really good to see it in data. And then you're like, great, what's your role in this? How are we going to do this together? The spotlight's on them, you're basically an orchestrator and a director and a leader, but you're not doing all the work. Your team as brand doesn't do the work. The execution is through the business. It's not onto the business.

Kiran Kapur (host) (23:52):
So Sarah, have you ever been in a situation where you've gone back to the leadership team and they've gone "Really? I didn't know that". I mean Rachel's just said, and I would always like to think, that the leaders would go, "Oh yeah, of course but that's great to have it in words". But have you ever been where the leadership team just didn't get it at all?

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (24:11):
I think it's been more that. I think the bigger problem is misunderstanding brand and feeling like a rebrand is a scorched earth strategy where they believe you're going to come back and say, yeah, we have to change everything, get rid of the identity, change the strategy. And actually the biggest surprise I think is when you telling them not to change and saying, actually in a recent example I had going in and saying, yeah, you think you've come in as a new leader and you want to make your mark, but getting rid of this identity is not the way to do it. And talking to them about the fact that identities that are recognised, build trust, get you preferred more over others, that things that people are familiar with, they pay more attention to. So actually the surprise is often they think you as an outsider wants to also change everything and going in and saying, no, no, no, no, you need to retain what is strong and what is strong from this diagnosis is actually your identity is working really hard for you.

(25:17):
People think it's distinctive against your competition. You've got some really strong assets, don't touch that. But your bigger problem is actually the fact that your values have nothing to do with what you're saying, why you exist. It has no link to why you say you exist as a brand in business. And actually that's the issue. And I think it's more the surprise is more the kind of measured approach often that we would go in with and the education that's actually needed to help people understand that destroying equity and what equity is and what associations actually are there in people's minds. I think that's the biggest surprise often.

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (25:57):
And that's what's so hard because if you are in a job for a few years, making those visual changes shows that you've done it, you've made a mark. But getting to the pricey elasticity and having really low pricey elasticity and having it as high as possible with as high margin as possible, or being able to take your marketing budget and get it to work twice as hard for you, or fixing experiences where there's like 16 different teams involved in delivering that experience and all the software stuck together with cell tape, it's that is really, really, I mean I've got a wonderful friend who calls it kind of the gruy work. It's the hard work and there's much less SMA and tadda about it. You don't get to make your slick little sizzle video. So it's totally understandable why people want to change the cosmetic. But there's something we mentioned in the book, which is we're sort of standing on the shoulders of giants.

(26:57):
You have to look at what the brand has had already, where it's come from, where it's been strong, and you have to leave it just as strong for the future. And that requires in effect a lack of ego about you leaving your mark and it being much more about strengthening where it needs. And that's quite tricky when you're new in a job and you want to show that you were the right hire and that you, even if it's an internal hire, that you're the right appointment. It's much, much harder to prove that what you are doing is working, but it is possible. And that again is why the diagnose is important. You can go, well, yeah, but if I mess with this, it's already working, that's money down the drain. And you'll hear finance go, don't touch that at,

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (27:40):
I think the other thing that actually is often a shock, which is still a shock to me, is the customer voice that you bring in and this perception that, oh, well all our customers think we're like this, or Oh, we don't have a problem with X. And then hearing that no holds barred qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers with real true data, not data that they've, when they've talked to the people who really like them and then they've fed back that, oh, 92% of people are aware of us, but proper data to show that actually only 4% of people are aware of you in the market. It's that kind of customer outside in perspective is often more of the shock, but is obviously critical.

Kiran Kapur (host) (28:24):
Yes, that's a really good point. So the other thing I wanted to come to was looking at measurement because I'm an absolute devote of an online platform called the Reg, which is an IT magazine, but it talks about 'Whale Song and Joss Sticks', and that's their view of marketing. We are all 'whale song and joss sticks' and they have a whole section where they quite often look at Rebrands. Consignia was one of the ones that they really went for, but they do it for other companies as well and say it's 'whale stong and joss sticks, marketing didn't know what they were doing, they just came up with something that was very cosmetic'. And one of the things I think when you're talking about diagnosis, why it's so important is to get that bit right. So how does measurement come out of it? So we've gone through a rebrand perhaps where you're thinking about doing a rebrand. How do you measure the impact of it? It

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (29:15):
Depends what you want to measure. So you should be measuring three things. So you should be measuring the strength of your brand, so the cohesion, the relevance, the ease and the difference, and you have the baseline from the diagnosis. So you should be going back and running that once a year to actually see whether what you are doing is making a difference. There's another thing which is how effective your rebrand has actually been. So for the things that you were trying to make a difference on where you were very targeted, has it improved it? So for example, if you've got a problem, not so much in the brand funnel, so not so much people being aware or being familiar or liking your brand or considering it or intending to purchase from it, but if you've got a problem, for example, once sales get engaged or once things go into a basket that things get stuck and they don't convert and you're like, well, I'm going to target fixing that because that's a big commercial problem, spent all this money on getting people to this stage, and then they just sort of seem to disappear, they ghost us mid purchase kind of thing, then that's what you should measure.

(30:21):
Has that improved and therefore is more revenue coming out of those buyers? You have to measure what it is that you are trying to impact. And then the other thing that you have to look at is if you get your experiences and your marketing to be more effective, you can look at all the different things in the journey that kind of give you a sense of whether the light is green or red, but ultimately you have to wait a full sales cycle and start looking at whether or not your revenue is tracking upwards because that's what you're going to sit in the boardroom and you're going to talk about revenue impact, you're going to talk about margins, you're going to talk about the length of the sales cycle and whether you can accelerate it. Those are the business conversations that you need to have. So we've put in the book those sort of different groupings because the exam questions slightly different, but what marketers look at what brand people look at to know what's happening is not necessarily what you present to the leadership team as being what is happening. You talk about commercial problems and the fixes and whether the fixes are working, and then you talk about all the stuff that's on the p and l. That's quite the normal run of the mill chat about finance and whether or not the brand is now making everything work harder, it's about not putting dashboards full of click-through rates and page completions and registrations to attendance at events and stuff in front of anyone outside of your own team because that's a leading indicator, but it's not a business metric as far as I'm concerned.

Kiran Kapur (host) (31:57):
That's such good advice because something that all marketers do, we all get terribly carried away that somebody we've had a five star review on Google or whatever it is that we are getting excited about. And you're absolutely right. Boardrooms are not necessarily interested in that. Sarah, what would be your take on the measurement question?

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (32:15):
Yeah, Rachel is so experienced at this Kiran, and there's a whole chapter in our book on it because it is such a difficult thing. I think there's also a couple of examples in there from Aviva and it showed how targeted they were about what to measure once they understood their rebrand and they could see that there were problems in the funnel and where was the problem in the funnel. And it was about that likability. It was this empty awareness problem. So I think there are diagnosing aspects of your brand within that diagnosis, like the funnel and then figuring out what measures do you need to track against to show that you have improved in the funnel. For them it was this, they were struggling with familiarity and likability. And so really dialling into that, getting everyone to understand that's what needed to be measured, and then communicating those changes and then looking across those revenue metrics, it showed that they were getting more direct sales after their rebrand versus sales through other providers wasn't changing, but direct sales to their website had gone up immeasurably, which is obviously a wonderful thing to show.

(33:37):
And that really hits that point that Rachel's making about is about revenue and the tighter you can tie it to business metrics and the less it's about a softer brand attribute metrics the more impact that will have in the boardroom. But you've also got to understand long-term, if you have defined your strategy and you've defined what you want to stand for, you've got to start tracking that both internally as well. The other thing that seems to be missed is employee surveys go on all the time, but there's no brand woven into that. So if you have defined in your strategy, well, this is who we are and this is how we do things around here, then you need to start tracking that in your employee survey to say, well, are we delivering? Do they know the values? How much do they believe we're living these values? And so building in brand into the employee side too is another big metric. And then you can start to connect that to retention and attraction. And it's not always about sales and revenue metrics. It can also be about that other key thing about retaining the best people and attracting the best people.

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (34:48):
I think the problem of the people is a really important one. So for a while it was very difficult for tech companies to recruit talent because if they got an offer from Apple or Google or whatever, they were off and that really, really really matters. And then in other companies we've seen very, very low churn of employees and it's sort of lauded us. You can have your career here forever, but it makes it very difficult to bring in new ideas. You actually do need a mix of people who know the company intimately and other people who are fresh even to the industry. So if you think about your business as only ever as good as the people who are making the decisions and behaving and creating your future, then having goals around what you want that cohort to think and believe. I mean, it can come down to there's little signals you can find.

(35:45):
So for example, would they recommend your products and services to a buyer, right? Sometimes you ask that question, you find no and you're like, oh God, okay, so you all love working here, but you would never recommend anything you're selling. So just even things like that where you start to see some smoke signals going up are really, really important. And at the end of the day, your business is only as good as the people that it actually has within it. So sometimes that is actually where the starting point is. And it's also often how you can tell that things are going to keep getting better because everybody does, as Sarah says, they get what you're trying to do, they get the values, they get the strategy, they're on board, they feel excited, they know what to do in their job. And so you can feel the momentum building in the business and you can feel that everybody is pulling together. And honestly, it does give you goosebumps, but it also, it is another indicator where you're like, this is going to work. This is going to work. Just bite your time. Slowly said it's going to work.

Kiran Kapur (host) (36:47):
That's really interesting. I'd probably recommend not going into the board and saying, "and we've got goosebumps. It's working".

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (36:54):
Normally the board says that actually!

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (36:57):
When they feel it and then you've done a great job, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Kiran Kapur (host) (37:02):
Fantastic. Before we finish, I'm just going to ask both of you, if you had sort of a couple of tips of somebody, if somebody sort, somebody's thinking about rebranding or wondering what they can do with their business and whether they should be thinking about rebranding other than read the book, which we will take as read, are there a couple of things you would suggest that they did?

Rachel Fairley, brand fixer (37:25):
Brand diagnosis. I mean, even if you're not thinking about doing a rebrand ever, you should be doing a brand diagnosis every year or so because you need to understand what is happening in the market and how it's changing and how buyer behaviour is changing and what is important to the buyer and whether you are seen to be the right choice for that and you know what I mean? And work your way back. And you need to know that to be honest, to fine tune your strategy regardless of whether you've even got the word rebrand in your head. So I would be doing that every year in enough advance to actually influence your planning process for the year ahead. So it might be that you have to start it halfway through a year in order for it to have the impact on the pre-planning before your new financial year.

(38:13):
But I would do that as a regular thing. And it also as a marketing leader, allows you to go back into the business and have conversations with other leaders about what's working, what isn't with data, and show up with things that are useful and relevant for a conversation with sales or with finance or with HR or with the ops, the head of ops. So that would be my tip is don't be afraid of a brand diagnosis. It tells you what work is going to make a difference, and that is, I mean, surely if we're going to spend all day working, we want to work on stuff that actually makes a difference.

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (38:45):
Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more with Rachel on that. I think it is about before you do stuff, there's just this desire to change and it's exciting and people want to, the first thing they want to do is hire an agency because that is really exciting. Just step back and understand what needs to change, why does it need to change? What is going wrong? Is that really going wrong? Do the diagnosis, do that work so that you understand what needs to change and why. Before you start wasting a lot of time and energy making changes that are not going to have an impact on growth, then you're in trouble. If you walk back in that boardroom and you've changed an identity and you've spent all that money, but it's made no impact on what they care about and what you are supposed to be delivering against, then it is just a cosmetic exercise.

Kiran Kapur (host) (39:35):
That is fantastic advice. Rachel Fairley and Sarah Rob, thank you so much for your time and your expertise and your insights. And the book is 'Rebrand right. How to Refresh your Brand and Marketing to Grow Your Business'. Thank you very much.

Sarah Rob, Brand Strategy Academy (39:49):
Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks. Great to talk to you.