The Issue and Perspectives of Re-Branding

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The brand is unique and appealing to the Target Audience brand image. The brand reflects exactly the attitude of the consumers, and trademarks, packaging is the only brand attributes, identifiers, anchor for the psyche, causing the desired Association with the object of consumption (the product, service or trademark).

Initially a well-established brand does not require any changes at the level of the image directly, the experience of the consumer about it. To change the attributes to customize the object itself or its attributes under the influence of time. And then, only if the form of motivating values, pushing a person to purchase, may change over time. In the case of rebranding we are talking primarily about the change in the level of brand image, changing the Foundation, the bases of the vector brand.

In modern market conditions regularly change the style of the company, synchronized with the change of the essence of our products and services, not only justified, but also are one of the signs of the successful functioning of the company.

The essence of the rebranding is that the brand, initially relied on one personal value that had the importance for this target audience, suddenly starts to bear another vector which may be important, not all representatives of the existing target audience. But it is important for those consumers who previously were not included in the number of adherents of the brand, which was aiming to draw. A new image is created throughout the communicative activity, which may include a restyling of the logo and redesign of the interior, but the main tool for shaping the changes in the mind of the consumer advertising and PR, and all other changes of attribute is just an adjustment to the motivational value of a new vector brand. Be limited to only one thing, change of a signboard or the range is hardly appropriate, if it comes to such deep changes of the brand image that involves rebranding.

So, rebranding can be an effective tool to support the development of a company in any industry and any scale of business operations. Successful rebranding is not a privilege of multinational corporations, or, for example, only the leaders of the cellular market.

1.2. Reasons for rebranding

Rebranding can be done for several reasons starting from organizational issues like the need to restructure the company and the way it does business, to needing to attract a different target audience to the brand, to changing the name that has become obsolete or just unfitting with current trends or just for legal reasons.

As well as this, authors mention that rebranding processes also include brand culling or brand termination – this is done so that companies can concentrate on developing the brands in their portfolio that have the most potential and not be distracted by smaller brands that do not bring so much profit (idem). Donnelly and Linton also mention reasons for beginning a rebranding process. The drive behind taking such a decision for a company may vary from the need to reposition a product (due to price differentiation, to expanding into different markets or simply wanting to change the image of the brand in the consumer’s mind) to trying to bring more local or regional brands into a global one. In addition, authors mention that there is sometimes the need to rebrand a product when take-overs or mergers happen so that the consumer gets a more cohesive feel of the new brand that results from such a merger or take-over.

Another important reason that leads to rebranding efforts for a company is investing in too many brand extensions. Sometimes a company that creates many brand extensions can end up using too many of its resources without helping any of its brands reach their full potential. Capon (2008) states that in order to be successful a brand extension must be made for a brand that already has positive associations in the consumers’ mind and that there should be a cohesion between the brand’s associations and the product extension associations. Too many brand extensions can corrode the values and images of the brand, they can make the brand become too diluted [3]. There is a model that deals with the alignment of values, culture and images of a brand that is supposed to create a good, strong brand. Aligning what these values express, what the brand culture is and what images are associated with the brand has been studied by Hatch and Schultz (2008) in their book Taking brand initiative: how companies can align strategy, culture and identity through corporate branding.[4]

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Figure 1.VCI Alignment model

Source: Hatch and Schultz(2008), p.11.

The main idea of the model is that the more cohesive and related to each other these three factors are (vision, culture, image, thus VCI) the stronger a brand is. More simply put, there has to be a coherence between what the stakeholders of the company associate with it and what they expect from the company, the way employees interact and what they think of the company and the way managers see the company in the long-term. If this vision-culture-image cohesion does not appear at the brand level then the brand is not that powerful due to “isalignments”

These misalignments can be between vision and culture, vision and image or between image and culture. The vision-culture gap refers to whether the company does business respecting the values it promotes or whether vision and culture are different from those of the company’s competitors. The vision-image gap deals with what stakeholders want and expect from a company, the difference between what they think they can get from it and what they actually get in reality. As well as this, it deals with the vision and values that are attractive to the stakeholders. The image-culture gap refers to what customers associate with the company, how they relate to it as well as how employees see the company and their relationship to it. It also deals with the ways the employees and the stakeholders of the company interact. When one or more of these gaps are present, there is an imbalance in the way the brand is portrayed, the way its values and identity are conveyed. On the long-term and even on the short-term, such imbalances lead to brand deterioration in the mind of the stakeholders, both employees and consumers.

As a result, when there are such gaps present, changes have to be made and management must consider a rebranding process, smaller or larger, depending on the size and importance of the gap.

Chapter 2. Rebranding process

2.1.