What goes into rebranding?

Everyone updates their appearance from time to time, whether to keep up with current trends, announce a change, or recover from a setback. Sometimes, brands need to do the same thing, which is why you periodically hear about your favorite companies unveiling new logos or creating new taglines.

Rebranding is the process of companies undergoing this change. What goes into rebranding is a complex reimagining of a company’s visual identity, often involving the creation of a new look and feel. Jotform recently underwent its own brand refresh and updated its logo, tagline, and color palette. In October, Facebook revealed a rebrand to an entirely new name — Meta.

If you’re considering rebranding your business, it can be well worth the effort. However, it’s important to plan properly so your rebrand doesn’t create brand chaos. Here’s a look at what goes into rebranding.

What goes into rebranding: The strategy

The rebrand strategy outlines what you’re trying to accomplish with your rebrand and the steps you’ll take to achieve it. Elements include the following.

Your goal

What do you want to achieve with the rebrand? Are you updating your visual identity because it has a dated aesthetic? Are you communicating your company’s evolution or trying to escape a bad reputation?

In October 2021, for our 15th anniversary, Jotform unveiled a new brand identity to showcase the full breadth of products we’ve added to our portfolio since the company’s inception. We updated the single pencil logo to include three multicolored lines representing the vast array of industries we serve, plus our platform’s diverse capabilities.

Brand team

No rebrand can be completed without a group of dedicated stakeholders to carry it out. This collective might be a team of in-house designers and creatives or a third-party agency specializing in brand identity. Often, it’s a mixture of both.

Game plan

Your game plan outlines the three phases of a rebrand:

1. Research and discovery. This is the preliminary stage of conducting consumer, market, and competitor research to better understand what the brand should become.
2. Asset creation. Next, the brand team creatives design the new brand identity and get approval from stakeholders.
3. The rollout. Finally, the new brand identity is officially revealed to the public and replaces the old branding.

In addition, the game plan details the tasks involved in each phase, who is responsible for completing them, the time frame for completion, and the budget.

What goes into rebranding: New asset creation

This is the most creative (and exciting) part of every rebrand — developing the new identity. The identity consists of many elements, and any of them can change in the rebrand process.

Logos are the signature of every brand, designed to encapsulate what a company is or does. A logo often contains both art and words. The most common reason for a rebrand or logo update is that its aesthetic and typography are no longer in style or no longer reflect what a company does.

Taglines are another major brand component that play many roles in a brand’s identity. The two most common are a value statement about what a company does — like Jotform’s new tagline, “Powerful forms get it done” — and a memorable catchphrase or brand promise — like McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it.”

If you can incorporate the tagline into a catchy jingle during commercials, that’s even better!

What goes into rebranding: The rollout

The rollout is the phase when the new identity is made public. This includes a massive update to the website, where new brand elements replace the old, and designers smooth over the presentation to create seamless brand consistency across all pages and channels.

For software-as-a-service (SaaS) brands, this also includes an update to the app or web platform. For consumer goods, a rebrand may include a total redesign of product packaging.

Since most rebrands coincide with a company milestone or a new product launch, many organizations opt for a full media campaign. A rebrand can be a genuinely newsworthy event, especially if the redesign impacts many customers.

Get a rebrand done with Jotform

Since its founding, Jotform has expanded far beyond the capabilities of a simple form builder. Now the platform offers project and database management with Jotform Tables, and workflow management with Jotform Approvals. You can even process online payments with Jotform. In addition, the full-service enterprise tools can help your team organize their calendars and task lists, manage assets, and run surveys to collect feedback about your new brand identity.

With more than 100 integrations with other web development, marketing, social media, and design platforms, you can run your entire rebranding campaign directly from Jotform. In today’s fast-paced digital world, rebranding has never been more complicated, but you can get it done with Jotform’s powerful forms.

Although the rebranding process is complicated by many moving parts, you can handle yours with efficiency and confidence if you break it down into manageable, bite-sized tasks and take it one step at a time.

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels