How To Organise A Great Rebrand (For Business Leaders Who Have Never Done it Before)

I have written this for you as a business leader who is planning a rebrand for your organisation. Most likely, you will be planning this together with your senior team. I imagine that you are the person in charge of the rebrand. You might be the company founder, the CEO, the creative director for the business or the head of marketing.

I also imagine that, working in these challenging times, with a polarising political landscape, shifts in economic outlook and very rapid technological developments – including AI – along with ever-increasing competition thanks to the global marketplace, you have identified the need for your organisation to review its brand strategy and visual identity.

You know that rebranding will enable you to be clear about who you are and what you offer. You want to stand out above all the noise and you want to ensure you are recognised and trusted by your clients wherever they are in the world and however they connect with you. That you do not become yesterday’s story or irrelevant.

Rebrands don’t happen very often. In fact, it may be that you have never planned for one before. Over the years and over many projects, I have developed a framework which I refer to when I am designing a brand, or when I am advising someone else about their rebrand project.

I am sharing this framework with you because I want to help you get it right; to enjoy a well-organised, exhilarating project, and to achieve an outcome which re-energises your organisation and positions it for future growth.

I want you to avoid a disorganised, stressful project which provides little return on your investment of time and money.

I am going to talk you through the four stages of my framework, and give you practical tips on how to manage each part of the process. I will help you get off on the right foot, shape a stellar team, get to ‘the big idea’, and translate this into a visual identity that works hard for you.

Managing a rebrand well, is an exciting and positive endeavour that brings many tangible and intangible benefits. On reading about this tried and tested framework, my hope is that you will gain powerful and practical insight into how great rebrands are best organised and managed. You will also see how the framework can relate to your own specific circumstances and needs as no two businesses or brands are ever the same.

I’ve seen a lot of visual identity briefs which feel like they were written by Chat GPT. Many things are covered: project overview, objectives, target audience, visual identity requirements (logo, colours etc), competitors, market trends, applications (website, packaging etc), phases of the project, budget, stakeholders, feedback and approval process. All useful information, but I am given little sense of the unique complexion of the particular project.

The first thing that helps you to get beyond the bland is your brand strategy. Good strategy is like therapy – it promotes self-knowledge and leaves the company happier, more confident and more focussed. So, share the outcomes of your brand strategy in the brief and let this self-knowledge inform the way you write it. The brief will be much richer for it.

I am often left wondering why organisations really want to rebrand. What is the real reason that lies underneath – at the root of the intent. Where are the pain points?

When you are writing the brief for the rebrand, try to move beyond the generic and be a bit vulnerable. What do I mean by this. For example, I recently had an uninspiring brief from an arts organisation. It was very procedural and technical. However, when I spoke with them in person, I learned that they were being criticised for trying to be ‘all things to all people’. For them, the project was actually about re-asserting their core objective – their reason to be – which is to have a positive social impact on their local community. This was quite a revelation for me, and it helped me to get under the skin of the leaders and managers involved and to feel their aspirations and wishes and get a clearer sense of purpose and what they wanted the project to really achieve. This is the kind of information that enriches a brief and immediately gets you into truly meaningful conversations with your potential future creative partners.  It may also be that through these conversations the nuance of the brief may shift and evolve as even greater clarity emerges.

It is a good idea for you to speak with a number of different, potential creative partners for your project. Agencies will be happy to have conversations with you and to put together a ‘proposal’ which outlines their first thoughts on your brief, their process, relevant work, team members, budget and timing.

It is not a good idea to begin creative work within a pitch process. Pitches happen fairly quickly, with little budget, and – crucially – without much dialogue between you and the agency. These circumstances mean that you will not get to know the agency and feel the ‘chemistry’ between you. The creative pitch will not reveal which is the most talented agency, and it is very unlikely to come up with the right creative idea for your new visual identity, as the majority of the required work has not happened yet.

A great way to find your creative partners is to start off with in-depth conversations with potential agencies, guided by your brief and their proposal, where you can see if you like each other. You can assess their skill and particular visual sensibility by studying their previous work and talking to their previous clients. In this way you are laying the foundations for a great relationship.

When you have identified your ‘front runner’ creative partner for the visual identity work, you can have a discussion with them about budget, timeline, ‘level of brand evolution/revolution’ and deliverables. Often these details are written into the brief as a ‘fait accompli’ but I encourage you to finalise them together with your creative partner. The outcomes of the project will be much better if you have grappled with this equation together.

When you get to a place which works for you both, you can commit to each other and move forward with the work. It can be helpful to update the brief with these decisions, and to add anything else that has come up in conversation, for example, how the brand will be looked after when the visual identity project is complete.

• Commission no-nonsense brand strategy
• Write a brief that covers the essentials, the strategy and shares some deeper truths
• Have detailed conversations with potential creative partners, invite them to submit proposals, study their previous work
• Discuss the parameters of the project with your potential creative partner before you both commit

Account handlers are helpful, but do not let them become intermediaries between you and the creatives. Whether you consider yourself to be a creative or not, you have more fun and get better results by building relationships with the people who are conceiving your new visual identity. When you and the creatives hear things ‘from the horse’s mouth’, you understand each other better, learn about each other’s worlds and set up the best environment for quick progress.

The objective is to configure your team and the agency team in ways which inspire a sense of joint purpose and discourage feelings of ‘them and us’. As well as your project team and the agency’s project team, form a joint team which meets once a week. This is not only about you looking at presentations of the latest work, it is about everyone discussing feelings and instincts and asking questions, collaboratively honing the creative thinking and the project process – and having ideas. The luxurious version of this is to set up a physical project HQ where everyone can come together undisturbed: a room dedicated to the project, where the walls can be plastered with experiments and ideas. I have done this  – for example on ITV – and it works brilliantly.

Do you have an internal creative who could be wholly or partly seconded to the brand agency for the duration of the project? They would be an invaluable fountain of information for the creative team, and after brand launch, this person would be able to use the new brand without interruption and to train their colleagues.

A great visual identity project has strong leaders on both the client and the agency side. It is your role as the leader on the client side to be open to change and to invite opinions from around your organisation, whilst being decisive in ways that may at times be unpopular. You may need to be firm with some of your colleagues, for example with department heads who are inclined towards empire-building. It is the role of the leader on the agency side to shepherd in the best possible visual identity by promoting an open-minded, collaborative and brave atmosphere for the project. You should expect them to engage with you respectfully and to challenge you when they think it serves the creative process to do so.

In my experience, the visual identity project teams that have achieved the best outcomes have been infused with a spirit of joy and positivity. The project teams that achieved dull outcomes have had a serious, workmanlike atmosphere. If you, as a leader of your organisation, approach this project as an exciting adventure and trust that your organisation and its customers will be invigorated by the outcomes, your enthusiasm will spread throughout your project team and beyond and set the scene for great results.

The other thing you can do is to demonstrate and encourage good listening. Remember that the senior creatives you chose to work with have had amazing educations in brand design and incredible track records in conceiving and updating  award-winning visual identities for organisations like yours. In turn, you can expect your creative partners to remember that you are the supreme expert about your organisation and sector, with proven talents in gauging what works in business and what does not.

Good listening doesn’t mean remaining quiet. All team members from the CEO of your organisation to the junior designer in the agency should be encouraged to speak freely and honestly. Lively, respectful debate is what you want. Remember the research that found that airlines from countries with more deferential cultures had more air disasters because the captain’s decisions were not questioned? I have seen the same dynamic in branding projects where people did not feel that they could question the senior decision-makers, and this led to some bad turns in the creative process.

Encourage the top-level decision-makers in your organisation to engage with the project regularly. Whilst some CEOs and CMOs will prefer not to get involved in the detail of a rebrand process, greater levels of involvement from them usually lead to better outcomes. It gives them the chance to better understand the ‘why’ of things, and to have the opportunity to share their thoughts sooner rather than later.

• Keep the core project teams on your side and on the agency side small
• Get these teams together frequently and nurture a collaborative spirit
• Connect directly with the creatives without intermediaries
• Be an active leader
• Promote a spirit of joy and positivity
• Encourage good listening and egalitarian debate
• Keep the top-level decision-makers involved

I call this stage ‘mysterious’ because the business of creativity is mysterious. I have never heard any great creative explain satisfactorily how they get good ideas. The best they can do is to talk about the circumstances that make way for good ideas. Picasso said “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” I have heard others talk about places, people or specific circumstances that have set the scene for them.

Brand design is art that serves a very specific purpose, so – whilst the question of how to get a good idea is mysterious – work can be done to set up the right circumstances for inspiration. Time can be ringfenced for ‘intelligent play’. This is where creatives ‘play’ by means of having fun, talking together, seeking inspiration in unusual places, experimenting madly and exploring different technologies. And they do this ‘intelligently’ by measuring all their play experiences against the project brief and the brand strategy to see what resonates. Finding an idea that is magical is hard; finding something magical which communicates exactly the right thing is a small miracle, and it is this that needs to happen at this stage in the project.

On the smallest visual identity projects this process might take two weeks. When I led the team doing the ITV network rebrand, it took three months. You can work out a guide timeframe for this stage according to the discussions you had when finalising the brief. But some flexibility here vastly increases the chances of the ‘big idea’ emerging. The creatives will stay in touch with you during this period, showing you things and asking for your thoughts. But this is not a time for sharing work more widely. 

Your role at this time is to defend this ‘creative incubator’. This will not be easy. Your business partners may interpret the lack of presentations during this period as a lack of progress. You yourself may become uncomfortable as you spend time in this unstructured ‘great wide open’. Have faith. This is the quickest way to get to a great idea. And it’s really worth hanging out for a great idea. A great idea unfolds into a complete visual identity quickly and enjoyably. The style guide comes together without a struggle. New creatives in the agency and within your organisation start working with the identity effortlessly. And – here’s the killer – a great idea means a great visual identity means a prosperous future for your organisation. Great visual identities last years and even decades (with subtle updates), whilst poor ones tend to require ground-up replacements fairly quickly.

When I am involved in visual identity projects where the ‘intelligent play’ stage is undervalued or excluded, I am forced to present formulaic or derivative solutions. Some creatives in this situation present a number of preliminary ideas, asking the client to pick a direction they like. This shuts down further genuine creative exploration, and sets off a downward spiral, where clients try to solve the problem themselves by giving excessively prescriptive feedback, and creatives lose their creative compass as they flog dead horses.

This bad process can take longer than the good process, cost more, be stressful rather than joyful, and end in mediocre work. Customers may notice the brand update and see that the organisation is not asleep, but a golden opportunity to help the organisation to fix problems and scale new heights is wasted.

As you review the routes, try to avoid making judgements too quickly. It may that you feel something of a shock to begin with – perhaps because the new routes are very different from your old identity, or perhaps because they look nothing like other brands in your sector. Often these reactions are ‘thoughts’ based on intellectual ideas and beliefs. Whilst interesting to observe and interrogate, ‘feelings’ tend to be more helpful. Does a route provoke an emotional response, (because it feels cozy and cuddly, vibrant and energetic, or witty and erudite), that feels right for your organisation? The most loved and long-lasting identities are those which connect with people emotionally and then say just the right thing.

At this point, the process becomes more structured again and regular meetings resume. You may decide to develop one or two routes. Do not censor your feedback. If you like one aspect of route A and another aspect of route B, share this feeling. In the respectful, collaborative environment that you have set up, you can discuss the implications together. In a recent brand project, I presented two routes to the CEO. She liked the concept of route A and the colour sensibility of route B. In this case, it was entirely possible to combine the preferred concept with the preferred colours.

You can share the work that you really like, (one or maybe two routes), with the top-level decision-makers in your organisation and decide on a creative route for your new visual identity.

• Make time for an ‘intelligent play’ stage
• Be on hand to support the creatives during this period
• Defend this ‘creative incubator’ from impatient colleagues
• Expect three routes and discuss these with the creatives
• Review work without haste, using your heart as well as your head
• Present your preferred one or two routes to the top-level decision-makers
• Choose your creative route

After a good creative route has been chosen and solid creative foundations are in place for your new visual identity, you can expect the pace to ramp up significantly as your agency adds people to their team and maybe brings in specialists such as animators, illustrators or type designers. AI may play a supporting role in making parts of the new identity.

As the building blocks of the new visual identity are developed and various brand touchpoints are considered, it is important that you keep measuring everything you see against the brand strategy and the visual identity ‘big idea’. For example, if the brand strategy is concerned with emotional connection, keep asking yourself whether the work is communicating this theme. If the visual identity ‘big idea’ is concerned with the heritage of the brand, does the work connect you with the history of the identity? You are a second pair of eyes to ensure that, as the process speeds up, the work does not lose focus. Special care needs to be taken when the agency brings in new partners, for example to work on your new website.

As you move towards the end of the project, your agency will make assets that will accompany a style guide: logo versions, brand patterns, presentation and social templates, following a list which you agreed when you finalised the brief together. A great visual identity project is one which leaves you with an easy-to-use system, so try to get as many of these assets as budget permits.

It is important that a good variety of branded communications are designed by your agency before they hand over the reins of the identity. These items might include stationery, marketing materials, signage and animating elements for social media. Budget may be the enemy, but, like the assets, get as many things made as possible by the people who conceived the identity, rather than handing these jobs over to your internal or external creatives, as it is the designing of these items that irons out the details of the identity and ensures consistency and quality at launch and beyond.

You will need a style guide that allows people in and beyond your organisation to work with your new visual identity. The way to invite people to engage properly with a style guide is to make it short, energising and human.

Whilst the scale of your organisation will necessitate a bigger or smaller guide, less is generally more. The good news is that a strong visual identity concept usually requires less explanation than a weak one, as users can easily see its logic.

I talked earlier in this article about the improved outcomes of visual identity teams working with ‘a spirit of joy and positivity’. I think this spirit can be infused into your style guide and passed on to future users of your identity. Storytelling is a tool which helps you to explain the visual identity in a succinct and energising way.

Good style guides speak with the voice of one colleague to another, rather than that of a teacher to a pupil, or a soulless robot. Speaking in this way, the guide invites the reader in, as it amply demonstrates the charms of the identity, describes in simple terms its mechanics, and acknowledges the reader’s important role in its implementation.

I have been involved in rebrands that have happened as a result of mergers that have been very difficult for employees. Sometimes this has meant increased workloads without increased pay. Whilst maintaining an upbeat spirit in the guide, you may choose to show some vulnerability and acknowledge the pain caused by such an event.

Whether you have seconded a creative from your organisation to your agency or not, it is a good idea to ask your creative partners for training sessions for those who will be working with your new visual identity and to arrange that the agency remain ‘on-call’ for the initial period of its use.

• Be compassionate as fatigue sets in
• Measure all new work against the brand strategy and the visual identity ‘big idea’
• Commission as many brand assets and as you can (logos, patterns)
• Commission as many branded communications as you can (letterheads, signage)
• Work with your agency to achieve a style guide which is short, energising and human.
• Ask for visual identity training sessions
• Arrange for a period after launch for your agency to be ‘on-call’

I have seen organisations waste hundreds of thousands of pounds on badly-planned processes and end up with a ‘bland’ identity. I have shared my framework for a great rebrand in this article to help you plan and execute your own enjoyable project and achieve fantastic results in a cost and time-effective way.

I have tried to ‘lift the hood’ on the realities of how brand designers think and work because I think you will enjoy your own visual identity project more and get better results when you engage deeply with your creative partners with a spirit of true collaboration. I also hope, as you deal with pressure from your organisation to procure amazing results with limited time and budget, this deeper understanding will help you to have good conversations about levels of investment for your visual identity project.

I hope this article has been helpful and energising. I wish you the very best of luck as you embark on your own rebrand project.

In this article, I have shared some big principles about organising a rebrand. Of course every business and each project is different. Many decisions have to be made in relation to the shape and needs of the organisation in question. If you would like my support as you explore and get into the details of your own rebrand project, I would be very happy to help, playing a smaller or a bigger role. Please drop me a line and we’ll set up a call.