Not doing so will not only lead to a more costly and less impactful implementation, it will also leave a lot of opportunities on the table that could have been leveraged.
Rebranding might be driven by marketing, but the functional side of getting departments to communicate their complexities to other groups needs to go through someone. Marketing will ask and answer the high-level questions throughout the rebranding process, but from an execution standpoint, some things will fall outside of their expertise.
Have you engaged the rest of the organization?
Involving specific departments within an organization is essential to success in the implementation stage. This should be addressed during the initial scenario planning and modeling stage.
Various aspects of rebranding can be achieved in a host of ways that don’t require a CEO or CMO to inform the entire group that change is imminent—but it does require you to engage all functional areas of the organization to understand the scope of assets they control, the operational cycles that can be leveraged, resource capacity, vendors or agencies, and other factors that will influence planning. No organization rebrands all its products in a short window.
Legal must walk through the time, costs and logistics of rebranding your business in different states or countries. Information technology must be prepared to update every affected URL and line of code. Facilities and real estate must oversee all changes in signage. A company’s public relations agency, media-buying agency, digital agency—all will have an integral voice in the implementation process. These units will probably be involved multiple times at different stages of the process. Logistically, some units will need more time.
For example, real estate is a long lead item that requires a broad understanding of its scope of assets. How you might want to effect change is a major cost factor, a large opportunity in many cases, and something that needs to get into motion well before many other aspects due to the activities required. Permitting and other legal requirements might delay implementation regionally or globally.
Some business units—say, facilities maintenance—might seem less connected to the process than others, but even they will need a new ID badge, for example. Even in these lightly impacted areas, strong oversight is needed to ensure the bigger-picture objectives of the rebrand are achieved: investing in the products that make the most impact, minimizing scrap, etc. Everyone in an organization can play at least a small role in achieving these objectives.
Assessing all the required work
As a rebrand reaches its clearly defined objectives, a few key areas will need to remain in sharp focus:
- Detailed inventories of physical and digital branded assets. This isn’t just about finding all things that have a brand on them. This is about understanding the ins and outs of every implication of brand change: What exists, what else is impacted, what is the operational cycle, who will rebrand them, what is their capacity, and what vendors or agencies are involved?
- Financial estimates and budget projections. This is a powerful tool that can help the CMO remove all subjectivity and drive the organization to select the right implementation approach by having all facts on the table though the presentation of multiple scenario models.
- Project governance structure and plans. What is the right level of centralized control for decentralized execution? What do we want to control, and how does the organization need to be supported in that? How will we control financials, tracking, reporting, approval processes, a help desk, etc.?
- Integrated planning, dependency and risk-modeling. Every single aspect of agency work, brand development and area of asset conversion all need to be integrated into one single plan—with all risks, dependencies, timing and resources considered to ensure project success.
- The logistics of asset conversion. Every area within an organization will need a different level of support in converting its assets. Facilities, for example, may need support to develop technical specifications for signage, do site surveys and recommendation books, manage vendor RFPs and the vendors themselves through prototyping, production, permitting, shipping, installation and post-implementation punch lists.
- Opportunities for operational improvement. Perhaps you have a decentralized organization and want to be more centralized. Perhaps you have processes or technologies that need to be addressed as a part of the rebrand. Perhaps you don’t have an agency or vendor standard operating procedure or a way to collect assets and data well—or you need to consolidate agencies or create an in-house agency for the first time. These and many other opportunities present themselves in a rebrand and offer an opportunity to integrate them into your planning and come out the other side simply operating that way.
