A Content Catalog Can Help Re-Branding Process

In today's ever-changing digital marketplace, rebranding is an inevitable milestone for most companies. Digitization is on the rise, new and agile competitors are entering the marketplace, and well-executed companies are broadening their market. These changes are resulting in a rebranding movement in the B2B industry.

Unlike the consumer space, B2B rebranding efforts are not limited to logos, website colors, and taglines. A B2B rebranding exercise usually includes a strategic shift in the company's go-to-market strategy. It signifies an important stage in a company's growth. Moreover, it offers an opportunity for better customer satisfaction and increased profitability.

However, a rebranding exercise is a costly undertaking. Research has shown that a rebranding exercise can cost between 10% to 20% of a company's marketing budget and may take several months to execute. Moreover, the success of a rebranding exercise is directly dependent on how effectively a company rolls out the brand internally and externally.

In our experience, we see that a well-managed content catalog helps companies reduce the cost of their rebranding exercise. It also helps with internal and external communications and lowers the potential barriers to the adoption of the new brand. In general, a rebranding process involves four important steps.

An up-to-date and trusted catalog of digital assets helps rebrand faster and cheaper. Here is an outline of how a well-managed catalog helps the rebranding process steps.

Research

A big part of research is understanding your company's current brand, the target market, your company's position in the market, and your competitive landscape. These insights will feed into your rebranding strategy. Moreover, if you are taking help of a branding agency, then they will benefit from the research. Your content catalog can speed up this process for your internal stakeholders and your external rebranding partners.

• The current assets will help inform the research participants about your company's current positioning, and branding.
• Recent market news, analyst research, customer case studies and win/loss analysis will help get a pulse on your company's target market.
• The performance of your recent webinars, blogs, and white papers will help you gauge the market sentiment of your current brand.

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Plan & Document

When planning, you need to answer two important questions for the stakeholders and senior management.

• What are we rebranding?
• What is the estimated cost of the rebranding exercise?

A content catalog can cut down the emotional noise and help quantify your effort upfront in the planning phase. Furthermore, it can offer you options to manage the estimated cost of the exercise. E.g., you can prioritize where you spend on rebranding. If you are anchoring the rebranding exercise on a specific solution, you can spend more dollars on creating and rebranding digital assets for that solution than refresh all your digital assets. Additionally, your content catalog can help you plan a phase-wise rebranding exercise. This iterative approach can reduce the initial budgeted cost. Senior management wants to see results before they sign a big check. An iterative approach delivers results on a faster timeline without spending significant dollars.

Imagine, you had your content catalog in control. A snapshot of your catalog (similar to the above image), can help answer important questions that can lay the foundation of your company's rebrand exercise.

• Do we have an inventory of existing assets?
• Do we create new assets or refresh existing ones?
• How do we retire existing assets?
• How many assets will we rebrand?

A solid rebranding plan and documentation not only reduces the cost and timeline, but it also helps keep everyone on the same page. By embracing data-driven decisions, you minimize personal bias.

Build

In the "build" step the rebranding team, including your agency partners, does the work. A "build" step includes everything from creating new logos, graphics, website layout, messaging to updating your prioritized assets to adopt the new brand. A strong plan based on a trusted catalog can drive significant savings in the "build" stage.

• You can create new assets faster by referring to the existing ones. It is much quicker to rebrand an existing Case Study than to create an entirely new one.
• You can leverage externally authored assets to support the new brand. Analyst research and market reports that align with the new brand will help you enhance your newly created assets.
• You can identify opportunities to repurpose existing assets. E.g., you can take a couple of existing blogs on a particular topic and convert them into a compelling white paper that supports your new brand.

Rollout

Without a proper "rollout," your brand's success is left to chance. Moreover, it is important to launch your brand internally first, before introducing it to the world at large. Your employees are your brand's most important ambassadors. It is a prime opportunity for senior management to rally the troops behind the vision. However, a new brand rollout is not an easy task. Moreover, many companies end up faltering at this last, but an essential, step of their rebranding journey. A well-managed content catalog can help fail-proof some important tasks in the brand rollout universe.

• Manage the switch. When you are moving from an older brand to the newer one, it is not only important to promote the new brand, but it is equally essential to deprioritize the older brand.
• Don't mix new and old digital assets. If your company is using content management or knowledge management system to distribute collateral, it is important that your employees have a clearly identify newer assets from the older ones.
• If you can, separate the access to, the newer assets from, the older ones. This distinction is important when you are in the midst of a phase-wise rebranding exercise. You will have a period where the newly branded assets and the older assets (that are yet to be rebranded) will co-exist. To avoid confusion, separate the access to the newer ones. The goal should be to eventually retire the older assets and switch all assets to the new brand.

Old habits die hard. Therefore, even after the rebranding exercise is complete, companies should continue to educate and re-train the minds of their employees, their partners, and their customers to adopt the new brand. A quality, up-to-date content catalog of the newly branded assets will drive faster adoption.