No one sets out to create a bad brand, let alone one that fails, and yet it keeps happening.

GAP’s rebrand lasted 6 days and cost £100 million. Royal Mail’s lasted less than a year and cost £2million. Both organisations underestimated the deep, emotive connection their customers had with their brand. In both cases sales were falling and the default response was to re-brand. But ironically it wasn’t the actual brand that was the problem, it was how and where the brand wasn’t showing up that was the issue.  

Brand projects that fail don’t just fall short of delivering against their goals, they actively harm the organisation.

Below we highlight some of the key moments where we have seen mistakes made and explore how you can make better decisions for a better brand, and stronger organisation.

Where it goes wrong before it’s even started

1. Procurement driven decision making

Procurement in general plays a vital role in many businesses, but it is usually set up for the things you buy day to day, it isn’t set up for a one-off investment in creative, an investment that can change everything while delivering barely anything tangible.

A view backed up by the research firm Forrester, whose research shows that dysfunctional procurement of creative services costs industry over $12.5bn in the US alone.

Using generic procurement processes, leads to the wrong decision about your partner. It’s how advertising agencies end up delivering rebrands (there are very few examples of this working well), it’s how the cheapest supplier ends up delivering a fundamental investment, and it’s how you end up with creative pitching.

Which takes us nicely on to number 2…

2. Asking for creative up front

Brand – true transformational brand – is all about understanding. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses, understanding how these marry your audience’s needs and wants, and understanding what drives your business and your team.

You can’t understand all these things through speculative creative done on the fly, and even if you could, the odds are the client wouldn’t recognise the value of what was presented – as they don’t understand all those things yet either.

Speculative creative is a recipe for flashy, trendy and gimmicky solutions – it will look great, but it will achieve nothing (see reason 7). To truly deliver against your goals requires the kind of insight that can only come from in-depth research.

3. Talking in an echo chamber

The ingredients that will form your future brand already exist, but what makes rebranding so difficult is that those answers need to come from the outside.

If you only ever talk to people who look at things in the same way as you, you won’t find the insight you need to navigate a changing world, or you’ll get lost along the way.

This means investing in stakeholder engagement and reaching out beyond your immediate bubble to talk to people who don’t know you and find out why they don’t know you. But also speaking to people who once considered you but no longer do.

Tough conversations with those least aware of your brand, is the only true way to deepen your understanding and expand your brand’s influence.

4. Avoiding the hard questions

The stakeholders we talk to as part of our research are always surprised.

They come into the session thinking they are going to be talking about brand, they leave feeling like they’ve just been through an hour of therapy.

Brand is an effort to influence people’s perceptions, to harness their motivations and affect their emotions. So, these are the things we talk about.

If you don’t get to the root of the big issues within a brand, then you will always be limited by them. Instead, if you embrace these issues and own them, then they become a means to unlock the power at the heart of your brand.

5. Imposing a strategic orthodoxy

From purpose to positioning, brand equity to golden circles, there are roughly 10 core models for brand strategy, 50 named frameworks and hundreds of variations on these themes across thousands of agencies. They can’t all be the right approach – and the truth is, on their own, none of them are.

A good brand strategy is a foundation to build on, not a structure to force everyone into. The best brand strategies allow room for empathetic responses, they provide space to adapt to the world around you, and they allow room for creativity.

6. Moving ‘past’ the consultation phase

Most brand processes front load their consultation – they see research as an input. Gathering insight to set their rebrand journey off in the right direction. Yes, this is vital.

But as Christopher Columbus proved when you are headed off on a voyage of transformation, a tiny error in direction at the start can lead to huge difference at the end. This is how he missed Asia and hit the Americas, and how Tropicana turned into Tropi-can’t with their failed rebrand, costing the company $30million in two months. 

Consultation is an ongoing process, co-creation, collaboration, socialisation, testing. These aren’t tick-box exercises to bring people on the journey with you, they are critical to ensuring you are on the right journey in the first place.

When your creativity only serves creativity

7. Designing for now

Grunge design, Swiss, Flat, Skeuomorphism, Non-design, Maximalist. These are just a few of the design styles that have waxed and waned over the last 20 years.

Digital print, web 2.0, social, the Metaverse, spatial computing and AI. These are just a few of the technologies and channels that have emerged over the last 20 years.

If you optimise for any of these, you minimise your chances of creating a brand for what comes next. If you build your brand around a new trend or new technology, if you design for the world as it is now, then you limit the longevity of your brand.

When creativity walks its own path, when it responds to the deeper needs of your organisation and your audience, and is designed for the world you want to make, then you create brands that last.

8. Solutions that ignore the day to day

We’ve all heard the stories – the big brand launch, it looks incredible, it’s innovative and pushes the envelope, but you know someone on the internal team, they can’t use it, it won’t print, people can’t read it and it’s costing them an arm and a leg.

Think about creating a brand as a game of thirds.

Creating the brand is only one third.
Selling the solution to the organisation is another third.
Empowering your team to use the brand is the final third.

Only when all three elements come together does a brand truly succeed.

Failing to deliver on early promise

9. Making the brand the story

There is a critical moment, when the brand first goes live, when it’s first introduced to the world and first impressions are formed. This is the moment when everything can come together or everything can fall apart.

If you make this moment about the rebrand, then you open the door to questions about the money you’ve spent and the time it has taken. If you talk about what you’ve done then you invite people to judge it, to make it about their likes and dislikes.

If on the other hand you talk about the reasons for the rebrand, the forces that led you to it and the changes it will support, then the conversation becomes about the future, spend is seen as investment and the work is judged on how well it serves the need.

10. Assuming the rebrand is finished, it never is.

You’ve worked tirelessly for months, everything has been signed off, the website has gone live and the press release is out. Job done.

Then the questions start, new services, old content, changes in strategy, legacy elements that can’t be changed, a supplier goes under, demand goes higher.

Your organisation isn’t fixed in aspic it lives and breathes in an ever-changing world.
Evolving the brand doesn’t mean you got it wrong it just means that as the world changes you change with it.

Get these things right and you will have developed a brand with the insight, strong strategic core and flexible creative to:

Deliver investment returns that keep on giving
If you invest in the long (and short) brand building game. According to marketing experts Binet and Field, the average ROI for a successful brand project shows results after 18 months, while product/features and benefits orientated content delivers the short-term results that many in the C-Suite demand.

Drive your strategic aims
Strong brands can charge more (10-30% more), the UK’s top 50 brands deliver at least 30% higher shareholder returns.

Withstand volatility
During economic downturns, companies maintaining brand spending maintain higher market share, while those cutting it suffer long-term, expensive recovery efforts.