This is a little lengthy, but a great, informal story on what it takes to rebrand a company – our company.
Sage Marketing Group is undergoing some some construction, so to speak. Our brand is evolving. We have been working the past couple months on the process of rebranding Sage Marketing Group and it occurred to us that our followers might find this an interesting process to watch unfold. It is not often you get to look “behind the green curtain” and see the inner workings of something like a rebranding campaign. Believing there is value in watching this process from beginning to end, we are going to use part of our Monday Musings to communicate this process and we certainly believe you will enjoy a behind the scenes tour. The rebranding process is very involved and detailed. If we shared the entire process with our friends we are pretty sure boredom might kick in. So, we’ll send the high level and more important information versus the gritty details (but we’d certainly share in detail if you are the kind that likes that). We’ll break down the process into segments that include: What is branding; do we really need to rebrand; the rebranding process; the rebranding decision tree; tools for rebranding; and the delivery and application of the new brand.
1. What is branding?
The word “brand” usually has a very wide and subjective definition. To some people the “brand” is simply a name and logo. To others, “branding” is the act of high-level awareness about a company, product or service. You will usually hear people say something about, “We need a branding campaign so people are more aware of us.” And to others, “the brand” is more about what people perceive your company to be. Our definition is a little bit different. We see branding at the total experience with your company, product and service. It is the complete embodiment and persona of your company. Yes, it is the logo. Yes, it is the advertising. And, yes, it is the perception of what you are. But, where the brand truly comes to life is when you have clearly stated a value delivery system to your customers and then every interaction with the customer supports that message and reinforces those principles. At great example of this is Disney. At the heart of their brand they have a couple of thoughts they want to deliver in all touch points. Two of these are fun and family. It doesn’t matter if it is one of their theme parks, a hotel, cruise ship or one of their events. Every one of those items revolves around fun and family, as well as some other principles (we call these brand cornerstones). And, over years, as Disney repeatedly delivers a fun experience for the family, that is when the brand truly comes to life and the magic happens when you look at the Disney logo (or hear the Disney name) and that brand is so powerful that the customer’s mind immediately positions Disney as a “brand” that is a fun and family place where laughter and magic happen regularly. Without this experience and expectation a logo is just a logo and doesn’t mean a thing. With the experience over time, the logo becomes the beacon to deliver the brand and expectations.
Another way to think about what a brand is would be for me to simply say two words and then let your mind go to work: Rolls Royce.
2. The Evolution of the Sage Brand: Why does a company need to rebrand?
Before we decided to rebrand Sage Marketing Group we first had to ask ourselves, “Do we need to rebrand Sage?” And, “Why are we rebranding Sage?” We have been in business for nearly 10 years. Over those years we have built up a great deal of brand equity. Brand equity is essentially mind share that customers have in regards to your brand and company compared to the competition. There’s a risk that when you rebrand your company you can either lose some of that mind share or confuse the customer. When the reality is if you rebrand yourself you actually want to increase mind share either immediately or over time.
In asking ourselves the two questions above, it became apparent that we needed to rebrand Sage Marketing Group. The foundation for this reasoning came in talking to our customers. In asking our customers what they thought of Sage Marketing Group we found that they were positioning Sage in their heads mostly what we were trying to communicate, but not fully. This was primarily due to our services changing over time, or, our services were about to change even more and the position our customers had would not equate to the changes forthcoming.
We found that our customers thought this about Sage Marketing Group: Sage has great ideas and can implement extremely well (true). They are very responsive to us (true). They are very good at branding and creative (true, but we do so much more). And, while good at the creative concept, all the creative work they do is through partners, but then delivered through Sage (not really true anymore). If you look at what our customers were saying about us, it is primarily positive, but not completely true. But, the manner in which we communicated what we did (and how we did it) drove customers to position Sage in the above manner.
Our choices were simple. One, we could simply try to tell our customers, “You know, Sage Marketing Group is actually more than what you think we are. We go beyond branding, being creative and implementing a marketing plan. We actually have a great skill set in social media, search engine marketing, PR, media buying, events and all the other functions of an advertising agency. And, yes, we still do partner with creative agents, but we also have some great in-house talent that we now use for more turnkey solutions.” We would start telling this story more often/louder/better and do so under the current Sage Marketing Group brand. Or, two, we could develop a “new” Sage (which is really not new, but would have the perception of being new) and deliver this to our audience. At the end of the decision, we felt developing the new brand was the best way to break through the current perceptions of Sage Marketing Group and communicate a new value delivery system. Plus, not only would this allow us to deliver the current message that was not being appropriately delivered, but would also allow us to communicate some truly new things such as in-house web development/programming and some new services that we are going to provide like web/email hosting and access to low cost/high quality printing through some of our printing relationships. The decision had been made to rebrand Sage. There was no turning back.
3. The Evolution of the Sage Brand: Where to begin?
So, the decision to rebrand has been made. Now what?
Actually, some of the initial steps had already begun and we just didn’t know it. We had surveyed our customers (this can be formal or informal). We had some discussions about Sage’s brand equity and decisions were made. But, since we’ve committed, we now need to take the next step. In our world this is developing what we call our Brand Standards & Guidelines and Messaging Document. The BSGMD is the “brand book” for a better description. It includes, initially just in text format, but later in text and design format, what you want your brand to be, communicate and speak. It tells of the experiences and value that the brand should deliver. And, most of all, it tells what it is we want our customers and prospects to walk away remembering about Sage Marketing Group.
The sections of this document include things like: The Brand Background, The Brand Story (historic and future), Brand Cornerstones (sometimes referred to as Visual Brand Language), Positioning Statement, Unique Selling Proposition, Single Net Impression, Tagline, Features/Benefits and Key Words/Phrases, among other items.
Of the above, all are important, but we believe the Brand Cornerstones are the most critical. They are essentially the 4-5 words we want to associate with the brand at every touch point. If you remember our discussion about Disney in previous communications, we believe two of their cornerstones would be fun and family and that every interaction with Disney needed to communicate these ideas. So, for Sage Marketing, we needed to rethink our Brand Cornerstones and what we wanted customers/prospects to think about us at every touch point whether it be: website, in person, advertising, events, hosting, printing, strategy sessions…. you name it.
The Cornerstone development process is probably not quite as glamorous as you think it is. We’d love to document it as some ultra progressive process using bleeding edge technology. But, what it really consists of is a white board and pen (or paper and pencil). Yup, ta-dah! OK, we are being a bit flip when we say this. The actual process is white board and pen, but the effort can be Herculean. The process really starts as a brain storming process and you put up all the words you can possibly think of that you’d want customers/prospects to think about your company. After the initial effort there is probably 100+ words on the board. And, every one of them sounds great and reflects your company. But, no one can digest 100 different ideas, let alone have the time to develop that relationship. So, you start to pare them down and this primarily happens with group words into buckets of like meaning. For instance, words like “quality”, “professional”, “skilled”, “able” might all fall into one group that you’d eventually call “Expert”. You continue this process until you have a set of manageable groups which in our case was about 10 groups. But, 10 groups is still too broad and time consuming to communicate. We needed to be even sharper.
Honestly, this process takes days. You spend hours putting ideas onto the board, refine and then walk away. You come back the next day and do the same thing. Over a period of days and hours you refine your Brand Cornerstones down to the 4-5 key words that truly reflect your desired position. Sage Marketing Group developed the following Cornerstones: Experts, Performance, Clever, Engaged and Do-ers
At this point your BSGMD should be about 80-90% complete. The cornerstones are done… as well as a majority of the other messaging components. It is time to put the BSGMD on the shelf for a little bit. But, don’t bury too far. We’ll come back to it later.
4. Creating Sage’s New Identity
With the Brand Standards and Guidelines in hand, we now embark on making our mark…. the logo. The logo will initially be applied to business cards, letterhead and envelopes (corporate identity package). It will then be applied to all future marketing materials using the Brand Standards to drive the application. We use our Brand Cornerstones (Experts, Performance, Clever, Engaged and Do-ers) as the foundation for developing the mark. We are going to develop 10s of different logos that could be the new Sage logo, but only one will make it. And, that one needs to best reflect the Cornerstones.
The creative process really starts to take shape here. We first start with what are the “musts” of the logo. We felt (and learned from our surveys) that the colors needed to stay the same as well as keeping the standalone “s” part of the logo. We learned that the “rays” on our existing logo felt a bit outdated. Especially considering we developed the original logo in 2002 and with electronic advertising and social media ramping exponentially over these years the “rays” didn’t communicate technically oriented. We also learned people loved our tagline: Wisdom Guides Success. They found it not only creative, but true in dealing with us. But, something unexpected happened. We spent the past eight years focusing on the “wisdom” part of the tagline. Our clients really resonated with the “success” aspect and that they liked Sage because we performed and created success. Hence, one of the reasons “performance” is one of our Cornerstones.
When developing logos we start with all logos in black and white. Even though we knew blue and green were going to be our end colors we started with the logo in black. This allows the logo really to stand on its own merits. And, in some future applications there’s going to be time for a one-color, black version of the logo. You have to make sure it works at the basic level before you can grow it. So, we developed probably 20-30 different marks that we thought reflected Sage and its Cornerstones. The inspiration for these logos comes from a variety of places and brainstorms. From these 20-30 we internally pared them down to three logos we felt represented Sage well. We then distributed them to our influencers and took their feedback. At this point we had an epiphany that the S could almost come through as a Ying/Yang mark in an abstract manner and this would support the Wisdom Guides Success tagline. From this step we had two logos that we felt could work. At this point we started to introduce color and we tweaked the shapes of the logos, font styles and layout. So as to not bore you, in the end we shared with our influencers again and we internally selected a logo that we felt represented our new focus.
When the applied the logo to our corporate identity package. Our old corporate identity package was white, blue and green. We took this same approach and the outcome was solid. However, someone on our team said, “I think the engaging and clever aspect from our Cornerstones needs to come through a bit more.” It could have been the power of suggestion, but internally we started to agree. We played with the layout a bit and it didn’t seem to really achieve what we were hoping to accomplish. And, then our designer did something brilliant. He added a new color – orange. At first it was a simple stroke of orange in the logo. It started to pop and create excitement. We had some reservations about adjusting the mark to have the new color so then he started applying orange as a complementary color, Not to the logo, but to the layout. And when this happened, we had exactly what we were looking for: engaging and clever. The use of orange is absolutely unexpected and clever. It adds a vibrant/engaging element. Note to ourselves, add orange to the color palette in the Brand Standards add Guidelines as a preferred support color.
5. Updating Sage Marketing Group. Boy, do we have a lot to do.
Great. We have a new logo. We almost have our Brand Standards and Guidelines completed. But, we have so much to do. We need to update everything: Website, social media sites, collateral (brochure and sales sheets), email campaigns, proposals, signage and a variety of other items. We also need to start our promotion campaign: ads, eBlasts, newsletters, direct mail, social media accounts, blog, PR and promotional items (hats, stickers and other handouts). It seems like a monumental effort. But, with some planning, it’s not. Our approach to this was to categorize things. The first category was the “we cannot survive without this” list. This included the website, sales sheets and social media sites from our updating standpoint. From a promotional aspect, we need to get our eBlasts, social media promotion, blog and PR going as soon as possible. We applied the same thinking to the rest of the items and had two more categories: What’s Next and What Waits. Being that the website is the single most important marketing tool we have, I’ll focus applying the brand to the website for the rest of this discussion.
The website is probably the best place to being your brand to life. You get the opportunity to visually and textually communicate your brand in a manner that people are going to spend some time getting to know you. It’s not like an ad where you may only have 2-4 seconds of time with your audience. If people are actively coming to your site they should spend many minutes learning about your company and story. This is your opportunity to deliver your message in a controlled manner and spend some time with your audience.
In developing our site we felt we had two directions we could take the site based on our Brand Standards and Guidelines. The first approach was one that was just an overtly over-the-top creative site. The second approach was a more performance/results focused website. So, guess what? We did just that. We mocked up two sites. One that spoke mainly to the creative side of advertising. The other that spoke to the results side of marketing. In looking at our new site can you tell which approach we selected? If we did our job right you are saying the performance focused site. Yes, there’s creativity to it (there’d better be, we are an agency after all). But, it should absolutely speak more to performance. The sleek design, performance images and navigation all speak to performance. But, it was an interesting story getting there.
Initially, I picked the creative site (even against the input of staff). I thought, “Well, we are rebranding Sage and here’s our opportunity to show the world how creative we are. Let’s go with this wildly creative approach and people will flock to us as the next creative geniuses.” Boy, was I wrong. I should have listened to staff a bit more from the beginning. But, I didn’t. And, as I showed it to clients and influencers they ALL said the performance site was who we were and who they’d known over the years. All of them agreed we are a creative bunch, but that we’ve always sold and positioned ourselves as a results-based agency and that creative was a given. Heck, if we weren’t creative then why would we be in the business in the first place? After getting out of my own way I decided that the performance approach was best. What really nailed it for me was going back and looking at the Brand Standards and Guidelines. It was clear that “performance, do-ers and experts” were clearly coming through in the performance site at the first glance. And, as our audience spent some time on our site they started to see our clever/creative side not only by some of the elements of the site, but also in the most important place – our portfolio of work. Viola! We had our website.
You might also find this interesting. Here’s some best practices for you to consider when working on your site: Note the contact information on each and every page, note the multiple ways to contact us, note the FREE marketing audit hook as an irrefutable offer to get our audience to engage with us in a harmless manner, note the on page text and the use of words that are industry related that will help our search engine performance (on page search engine optimization), and, note how we’ve made quick links to all our capabilities you can see at one glance. These were all done purposefully to give the viewer a very easy and effortless way to contact us or continue through the site.
6. Delivering an 800lb. baby.
In the scheme of things, Sage isn’t really an 800lb. baby. But, it is our 800lb. baby. Being our boutique size makes this a big project for us. Not only do we have to deliver the baby, but we have to take care of our clients and current business. In order to speed up the process we didn’t create a behemoth of a marketing plan. We created a short-form communications plan. It was ideal. This plan allowed us at a glance to look at all our tactical areas: PR, eNewsletters, Direct Mail, Social Media Sites, Ads, Promotional Items, Promotional Collateral and the like and devise a way to adapt the creative approach to each of these media and then a way to stage and deliver. For instance, our budget and plan doesn’t call for us to currently run ads at this time. So, we created those last and put them to the side. But, it did call for eNewsletters, PR, social media and direct communications. So, we focused on developing those items that would assist with those tactics. And, since we have an annual plan in place, much of what we did was plug-n-play, to a degree. We knew we were doing eCommunications, but we had to change to our new story. We knew we were doing our social media efforts, but we needed to change the message to introducing the new Sage. So, by having an annual plan we actually sped up our process as we didn’t have to create the plan and the collateral at the same time.
The truth is we’ll unveil the new Sage Marketing Group for a period of 6-9 months. Just like most of our clients, we have a set budget. We need to work within that budget to keep us operationally efficient. We wanted to roll out the new Sage and shout it from the rooftops. But, practicality kicked in (darn that logic). But, with logic comes opportunity. We can actually use our new message for a period of 6-9 months and get even greater bang for our buck than one big splash. In the perfect world of McDonald’s and GM, we’d be able to do both. And, in a sense, we are doing both, but scaled to our business size. I prefer to look at it though as a longer term roll out where I can control the touch points and audience.
Our final step was then to finish the Brand Standards and Guidelines and Messaging Document (BSGMD). Since we now had colors, logo and sample collateral we could then go back and apply to the BSGMD so that all future work would have a platform to be developed from. We finished it up and put it on the shelf for a future day, so to speak. It will be a tremendous tool for marching forward.
So, that’s it! That was our rebranding story. Much of it got condensed as there was a lot to be done. Hopefully we covered the high impact items for you. And, best part, our door is always open. If you’d like additional information or depth about our process, or how the process might apply to your company, please give us a ring, send us an email or tweet with me at your leisure. Until then, you may enjoy seeing some of the visual outcomes of the rebranding process.
