Managing a successful brand launch
Managing a brand launch can be overwhelming. In this episode we uncover a few simple tips to help you roll out your new brand successfully and hopefully, stress free.
Good morning. My name’s Kiri, I’m the Business Growth Strategist here at Tiny Hunter, and today I want to talk to you about launching a new brand because our clients ask us about this a lot, and I know it can seem really overwhelming.
Essentially there are three phases to launching a new brand. There is pre launch, which involves getting your team up to speed on the new brand and rolling it out across all your brand assets. There is the launch how you’re going to announce your new brand to the world, and then there is the post launch, which involves getting feedback from your audience. What do they think about the new brand? And also, how is it performing out there?
But today, I just want to focus on the pre launch because this seems to be the phase that our clients find most daunting. You’ve worked with an agency to develop this amazing looking brand, but the thought of that document and how you’re going to roll that out across all your brand touchpoints can just be really overwhelming, we get it. One thing I know about overwhelm is that it helps to get it out of your head and onto paper. That’s usually where we start with our clients. We work with them to develop a brand implementation plan, and that starts by creating a list of all the brand assets you have, and maybe some you haven’t thought of, and then it needs to be prioritized in terms of what’s most important to least important.
Once you have done that, you then need to look at roles, responsibilities, who is going to create these brand assets, and do they have the right skill set to do that? If you’re doing it internally, yes, you need to think about capacity, have we got time to do this? But also capability, do we have the skill set? Perhaps you might need to do some training or some workshops with the team to get them up to speed on the new brand, the messaging, the values, if they haven’t been involved in the journey.
If you’re looking at using an agency, that can look a number of different ways too. There have been instances where we have just reviewed the work done by our clients and acted as a brand guardian. Agencies can create templates for you, which make the rollout a lot easier or, of course, they can do the whole thing. One thing to remember is that you don’t need to do absolutely everything in order to launch the brand. While that would be an ideal situation, it’s just not the reality for most organizations. That’s why prioritizing what’s most important, what is of most value to your clients, and focus on those ones. For many, that’s your high customer touchpoint assets, which would be your website, your packaging, your sales collateral. Start from there and work your way through that brand implementation list.
The last thing I want to talk about is brand guidelines, which I know I go on a lot about, but really they are such a helpful tool for you and your team. If you’re a brand manager or marketing manager managing this rebrand process, I urge you to push to include, a brand guidelines in your scope of work. It will make your life a lot easier, but more importantly it’s going to improve the outcome and the quality of your brand rollout.
That’s it from me, it’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Kiri White
Published: August 16, 2023