A brand is ultimately experienced through the people who represent it, so if they’re apologizing for “gawdy colors”, grumbling about the new slide template, or can’t explain what the brand stands for, the rebrand has fallen at the first hurdle.
Resistance is rarely about the logo. It comes from past rebrands that were painful to implement, a belief that brand is just a color palette, or the cynicism of having “seen it all before”.
The good news is that skepticism can be turned into enthusiasm. Below we list five ways we help clients bring their people with them.
1 – Engage stakeholders early and keep them on board throughout
- Involve the leadership team in identifying and articulating the core brand positioning, and get their buy-in to the resulting visual identity (more on this in our article: What our own brand refresh taught us about finding the common thread)
- Appoint brand champions from core business areas and give them ownership of engaging the teams they represent
- Don’t swim against the tide – set up a governance group for key decisions aligned with the broader business
- Create channels (e.g. Teams or Slack) that match regular project meetings – questions can be resolved in a shared space and momentum sustained
- Keep the rebrand team visible and accessible through those channels, intranet communities etc, with cameras on at every opportunity
2 – Generate excitement
- Get your CEO visibly cheerleading for the change – milestone communications should come from him/her
- Video your heads of department articulating how the verbal identity comes to life for their areas
- Dip into existing forums e.g. townhalls and monthly meetings to maintain engagement in the process
- Include people photography in your new brand guidelines and make use of existing gatherings to get new headshots taken
- Circulate samples of new merchandise and get people to pick out their favorites
- Share photos of the new event branding on its early outings
- Celebrate the launch of your rebranded offices (yes, we’re talking cupcakes decorated with your new logo!)
3 – Familiarity breeds comfort, so immerse your people in the brand
- Make sure new branding is reflected on home screens, sign-in pages, screen savers etc
- Run training sessions on how to use the new templates. Provide time zone options and host the recordings somewhere accessible
- Use every opportunity to quickly remind teams of the verbal and visual identity
4 – Make it easy for people
- Provide usable guidelines (From guidelines to reality: rolling out a brand across every touchpoint) on how to use the new kit, both visually and verbally
- House all guidelines, templates and assets in one readily-accessible place. File them in there logically and label them clearly – if you don’t have an intranet or a digital workflow platform, a simple SharePoint page will do the trick
- Set the new branding as the default in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, internal platforms etc
- Signpost everything clearly wherever your people gravitate to – on your intranet, your Teams or Slack channels
5 – Keep the door open after go-live
- Provide a central comms point for queries, requests, and the inevitable template that people forgot to request pre-go-live!
- Don’t respond defensively to push-backs. Brands live and breathe and sometimes it’s only in the execution that potential refinements are spotted
- View the brand guidelines as a living framework that grows alongside the organization rather than a finished document (for more on this, see link above)
And with some time in the bank post-launch, prove that it was all worthwhile: collect feedback from clients via the brand champions, demonstrate adoption across the business, track brand awareness, website visits and leads.
Keep the conversation going, demonstrate adaptability as needs arise and the environment evolves, and show people that their involvement made a difference. Because ultimately, the best antidote to resistance is giving people reasons to lean in.
