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Today, Target is regarded as one of the top powerhouses of retail, but in the late 1990s, it was struggling to compete with the famously ultra-low-cost retailer Walmart.

Its proposed solution was counterintuitive: rather than drop prices even lower, Target took its brand in another direction entirely. Its leaders reshaped its stores into upscale alternatives to Walmart, making them refined destinations that featured a finer ambience and superior products.

To align with this brand strategy, Target partnered with impressive fashion designers, expanded its market to offer organic produce, and redesigned its store layout, ultimately refreshing public perception of the brand between 2003 and 2009. And these efforts have paid off: the company has since developed and maintained something akin to fandom, particularly among young adults who enjoy leisure shopping at its stores.

What Target’s history reveals is the potential power of rebranding and the importance of reflecting on your business’s public identity. When you fail to direct sufficient effort into shaping and illustrating it, you allow customers to decide for themselves what your organization is, what it has to offer, and why it deserves attention in a competitive marketplace. A rebrand could provide such answers and even satisfy overarching goals for your business.

What is branding?

Before strategizing a rebrand, it’s essential to contextualize the true meaning of branding: the collection of efforts a company makes to influence how customers view it. These objectives coalesce your reputation and the emotion behind your organization’s name into a lasting impression on the public. “The core elements of branding are artifacts and experiences,” explains Mike Spakowski, partner and creative director of St. Louis branding agency Atomicdust. “Artifacts like logos, copy, websites, and signage all establish how you want the brand to be seen, while experiences like your store’s cleanliness, staff’s friendliness, and website’s user interface are where the brand lives. It’s how people judge if the reality of the experience matches the ideals of the artifacts.”

This means that rebranding can be as simple as adjusting your graphics or as far-reaching as conducting a floor-to-ceiling transformation of who you are, akin to a personality transplant. Through such changes, you can better shape how your company looks, feels, and sticks in consumers’ memories.

Why rebrand?

Brand alterations could be hugely beneficial to both struggling businesses and those looking to advance their current success, helping them address the following key priorities.

Increase brand awareness
If you fear your organization doesn’t suitably stand out among a crowded field of competitors, adjusting your branding could lend it a more distinctive persona and attract greater consumer attention. As Los Angeles and New York branding agency Hawke Media states on its website, even something as simple as modifying your product packaging can “command attention, narrate your brand’s tale, and distinctly set you apart in a sea of competitors.”

Raise revenue
Rebranding can also help you supersede industry or economic challenges. “A company should consider rethinking their brand strategy when they want more traction in their market,” Spakowski says. “This can mean getting new leads or closing more sales.”

When the Getty Store, two museum shops inside the renowned art and history institutions, temporarily closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization shifted its efforts toward its digital store. Hawke Media stepped in to design social media ads, conduct email campaigns, and partner the shops with popular influencers. The objective: transform the Getty Store’s public image from a simple on-site gift shop to a digital destination where one can find posh and stylish products anytime using any smart device.

As Hawke Media boasts online, “Approximately 80 percent of [Getty’s] online customers in the 2021 holiday season were first-time buyers, showing the success of reaching a broader audience.” The brand expert even helped the store achieve an astonishing 99.1 percent revenue increase year over year.

Reach a new audience
Making changes to your branding could further allow you to position your organization in front of new market segments. Though Crocs was already a successful shoe brand, it aimed to avail itself to a young and fashionable audience in 2022. To do so, it enlisted Hawke Media to help it go viral on youth-centric TikTok by aligning its brand with popular influencers. These included Josh Richards, a content creator with over twenty-five million followers and two billion likes on the platform.

The result was over four million impressions and thousands of new website visits, particularly among members of the Gen Z demographic who received organic ads. By choosing to reach out to an untapped audience, Crocs reinvented itself as more than just loungewear—it became trendy attire for a young crowd.

There are numerous other potential benefits of reshaping your brand identity. Spakowski remarks that such a strategy can also help organizations boost their internal morale and even attract new talent to accelerate their recruiting.

How to helm a rebrand

While there isn’t a single comprehensive approach to rebranding, Spakowski shares one of Atomicdust’s central strategies: take what seems immediately genuine about your organization and use it to shape the best, most authentic representation of your public identity. He further explains, “How do customers hear about you? How will you make their lives better? What do you want them to know about your beliefs and worldview? Graphics like logos are just empty, meaningless vessels until you fill them with an experience.”

From there, consider what changes are most crucial, either by tinkering on your own or enlisting the expertise of a professional. These may include modifying your services like the Getty Store, expanding who you market to like Crocs, or updating the types of products you offer like Target. What’s crucial is pinpointing which segments of your branding efforts require attention and which are lucrative in their existing states. In other words, you may be on the right track, but some slight adjustments could polish the public perception of your brand. As Spakowski astutely notes, “Sometimes you don’t need a whole new set of tires—you just need an alignment.”

TAKE ACTION:
Consider how rebranding could portray the core principles of your organization more clearly, succinctly, and memorably to your target audience.