Volume 010: A good reason for a rebranding.

1. A good reason for a rebranding.

Tl;dr: This edition is late because of rebranding, so I may as well write about it.

I’ve been helping a client with the business case for a rebrand, so I figured I may as well write about rebrands.

There are lots of bad reasons for a rebrand, but a singularly good one is when it’s being used as a distinct signal of change. While it’s fashionable to say that logos don’t matter, the simple fact is they do. They’re the primary symbol of the organization, they’re legally protectable assets, and over time you build equity in the symbol as the identifier of your brand, which has meaning to stakeholders. This is why rebranding should always be carefully considered. You don’t want to destroy more value than you create just because your CEO or head of design hates your existing logo.

However, sometimes, particularly for businesses undergoing a considerable transformation, this value equation flips on its head. The value of changing a logo that has become weighted down by legacy associations outweighs the cost of giving it up. The opportunity to do something new outweighs the cost of sticking with something old. And the one-time impact of making a big signal of change outweighs the cost of people just not noticing that you’re not the same business anymore.

As an aside, a little-known feature of rebrands is that the primary audience often isn’t the customer, but the employee. Sure, customers are important, but when senior executives need to make a big signal of change they’re often talking first to their employees: Challenging the organization to live up to a new promise and encouraging them to take pride in what they can be as opposed to what they have been. It might sound silly, but from a psychological perspective it’s much easier to promote change when the overt symbol of that change is all around you than when it is not.

3. Creatives just as unimaginative as the rest of us.

Tl;dr: Creatives just want to work with Google and Amazon too.

This week, “Working/Not Working” released a list of the top 50 companies their community of creatives want to work with. Looking forward to discovering a whole new set of creative businesses, I made a point of checking it out. Unfortunately, it’s a list of global mega-brands and their agencies. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at the utter lack of imagination on display. I wish they’d released the bottom 50, because I suspect the long tail here would be singularly more interesting.

To save you the trouble of reading the full thing, it essentially boils down to a smattering of global mega-brands and the agencies that work with them. It isn’t really a top 50 list at all. Creatives just want to work with Google and Amazon and the agencies that serve them.

4. Superbowl gobbledygook with Marc Pritchard.

Tl;dr: Mass one to one brand building is a Super Bowl ad.

As Chief Brand Officer of P&G, Marc Pritchard is almost certainly the world’s most powerful marketer, straddling a global advertising empire that ranges from razors to tampons. By most accounts he’s a pretty savvy guy, although it’s hard to tell for sure. The marketing press tends to be more than a little sycophantic toward people with budgets as large as his.

Anyway, a striking feature of Mr. Pritchard’s public persona is how unintelligible he is. It’s unclear if this is a deliberate obfuscation for the media or whether Marc always talks this way. Here’s an example from an interview he did this week discussing the next ten years of brand building. In it, he says that P&G is “reinventing brand-building from the mass marketing of the past to one-to-one brand building on a mass scale using data and digital technology.”

I initially had no clue what he was talking about, but I am pretty certain nobody wants a one-to-one brand-building relationship with their dish soap. Then P&G’s Superbowl plans revealed the truth: One-to-one brand building on a mass scale using data and digital technology = a choose-your-own-adventure Superbowl ad. OK, whatever. I guess somebody will be bored enough with the football to go click on the P&G website a couple times.