The Complete Rebranding Strategy Guide in 2022

We’ve recently changed our logo to reflect our new branding at Jestor. Therefore, we organized a rebranding strategy detailing how to rebrand in 10 steps that we went through during the design process in a high-level explanation with our own real rebranding case. 

Estimated reading time: 11 min.

What is rebranding?

Rebranding is a marketing strategy in which a new name, term, symbol, design, concept or combination thereof is created for an established brand with the intention of developing a new, differentiated identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebranding

Step 1: Clarify what your brand means.

It seems like an obvious step, but it’s common for companies to want a rebranding strategy without knowing what they want to communicate. 

The easiest way to do it is to think about your own business. Forget about colors and shapes for now. Think about what your company wants to achieve, your target audience, product, and goals.

Answering these questions will help you during your branding process:

• What are your company values? 
• What does your company want to be? 
• Why do people like your product or service?
• Who is your target audience? 

If you already have the answers to these questions, skip to Step 2. 

Step 2: Identify your brand voice and personality. 

In order to build a good brand, you have to make choices. Great brands cannot be “innovative” and “traditional” at the same time. Your message will confuse your audience and create a brand without personality. 

You can have a nuance between a few opposite choices, or even be neutral, but you can’t be both. A popular methodology is to assign values 1-5 or % to represent your preferences. 

Here is a list of a few opposites that you can choose from to map your rebranding strategy:

• Light (1) – Bold (5)
• Modern (1) – Traditional (5)
• Singular (1) – Popular (5)
• Fragile (1) – Strong (5)
• Impulsive (1) – Analytic (5)
• Urgent (1) – Patient (5)
• Luxury (1) – Acessible (5) 
• Pro-active (1) – Passive (5)
• Innovative (1) – Traditional (5)

Jestor example: 

• Singular
• Strong
• Direct
• Analytical
• Rational
• Innovative 
• Pro-active

After you do this exercise, select the ones with the highest score to define your voice. 

Step 3: Define your company – Who are you? 

In order to define your brand, you need to put into words that define your company. It’s also important to define who you are not. 

Jestor Example: 

1. Who we are:
   1. Essential 
   2. Curious
   3. Truthful
   4. Trustworthy 
   5. Obsessive 

2. Who we are not:
   1. Limited
   2. Hard
   3. The same

Step 4: Define your public – ICP.

You probably already did this exercise before, defining your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) or persona. The only observation I have is that your ICP changes with time, make sure you revisit it before you move forward with your rebranding strategy process.

Jestor (reduced) example:

• Non-developer teams managing field operations.

Step 5: Define positioning and branding.

Positioning it’s all about how you want your public to perceive your brand. Defining your positioning and branding it’s a complex process, for the logo exercise we’ll assume that you already have everything you need to move forward. 

Jestor short phrase example:

• Freedom to build.

Step 6: Choose your colors.

We didn’t want to be “another blue software”. We wanted to choose support colors that made us stand out compared with other no-code solutions in the market. In order to do it, we’ve created with our partners this study: 

However, we wanted to make our logo black and white. Our current clients are mid-size and large companies, we preferred to go for a more slick style instead of a “colorful/fun” style. 

Jestor colors and reduced logo version:

For support colors, we’ve chosen colors that could be used in light or dark mode (soon on Jestor ?). They are inside the 2 circles in the study above, in the “opportunity zone”. 

Here you can see how they behave with different light and dark backgrounds: 

Step 7: Choose a typography.

This is a pretty technical step. The font makes a lot of difference in the overall style and brand that you’re building. 

Here are a few things that you should consider when choosing a font: 

1. Is it an easy-to-read (readable) font? 
2. Where are you going to use it? In an ad, website, digital product, physical product? 
3. Will you need to print it in different materials?
4. How much does it cost? A few fonts are not free. 
5. Do you want a more geometrical feel? 
6. How are going to symbols behave? Symbols could be strange or hard to understand in a few fonts. 

Jestor’s choice: 

Step 8: Rebuild your icon (or not).

An icon can be really useful for brands for being easily recognizable and to be able to fit your logo in different contexts in a place where writing the entire name is not ideal. There are a few different rebranding strategies combinations that you can choose: 

1. Icon only

2. Name + Icon

3. Name only

These companies are large corporations and have all the 3 types in different brand variations and products, but these are the predominant way that they represent their business. Most companies use the “name only”, it’s the simplest way to create a logo for your company.

We’ve decided for a combination of name + icon, and depending on the context we may use them together or separated. The icon it’s really important for us because Jestor is a digital brand. We need our logo in apps, browsers, etc. 

1. Icon only

2. Name + Icon

3. Name only

The icon ideally would represent something that reflects your company’s values, history, product, etc. For Jestor, we wanted something that would bring the “jester” aspect of our brand. We translated the jester’s hat in simple shapes that are also the “J” and “r” in our name. 

We use the jester because he is willing to do anything to make the king happy. He is the most flexible professional ever. Jestor’s mission is to make our clients (the kind) as happy as possible, being flexible to meet their needs. 

Here is a side-to-side comparison of the jester hat and our icon: 

Step 9: Test the rebranding strategy in different contexts.

It’s important to test your logo in various contexts like a website mockup, business cards, reports, gifts, and other places that your brand may be applied. It’s an interesting exercise to stress the use of the logo in combination with your color selection. 

Here are some applications of our brand in different materials and places: 

Step 10: How to Keep the brand consistency.

Great! Now you have your new logo and you did your first implementation. Now you don’t need to do anything else, right? No. Now you’ll need to work hard to make sure every department in your company will follow the brand guidelines. 

It’s harder than you think. Most people think there is no problem to “stretch the logo a little bit to fit in the email signature” or “this blue is almost the same blue”. We suggest you to share the rebranding strategy to everyone in the company and correct when someone applies it incorrectly.

I hope it was helpful as a guide for your logo creation. Good luck! 

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