Your Step-by-step Playbook for How to Manage A Successful B2B Tech Rebrand

You did it. You went and did what few firms have the guts to actually do. You got serious about your brand. By now you know that it’s more than colors and fonts. You know that it all comes down to how the world experiences your brand, and that all starts with how you roll out your new brand. Or maybe you’re reading this because you’re thinking about a change of brand–if that’s the case, good. You’re about to see that a change of brand is more than a logo and a website. Do it right, and you’ll launch something that both your team and customers love for years to come. Get this part wrong, and you’re in for a world of chaos. Rebranding is one thing, but launching the brand in the right way is just as vital.

Getting it wrong isn’t cheap. In 2001, Royal Mail rebranded to Consignia but faced intense internal resistance and public backlash, eventually reverting to its original name. The failed rebrand cost Royal Mail an estimated $1.5 million.

Remember RadioShack? Without clear communication or internal alignment, their 2009 rebrand to “The Shack” was met with confusion, and employees struggled to explain the change to customers. The rebrand was so poorly received that it marked the beginning of a decline for the entire company, which eventually declared bankruptcy.

A lot of things need to happen from the inside-out to be sure your new brand gets executed and implemented the right way–with impact.

Before you get started on all the tactics involved with managing a successful brand change, first it’s important to take a moment and celebrate with your stakeholders for making the brave decision to do this. Don’t overlook the work and resources that have gone into creating your new brand. It’s a big moment!

When you’re done sipping champagne, use this guide as a checklist to ensure the new brand permeates everything you do, and ultimately causes your business to benefit and grow from it.

In this guide we’ll walk through what you need to do internally with your team, and then externally with your customers, clients, and partners to ensure a successful change of brand.

Enjoy!

Internal: How to roll out your new brand to your team

01 Start with your leadership

Align your executive leadership team on why the brand change was made. Oftentimes, we recommend that this group be deeply involved with the brand process in the first place, but if they weren't, be sure they are the first ones that you unveil everything to before you show the rest of your team. Rally them around the new clarifications of your brand and the meaning behind the changes.

Ask everyone on your leadership team to uphold the new brand by holding them accountable to these key actions:

Living out our values at work
Praising team members who exemplify our values and mission
Always be realigning our team to our clarified vision and mission
Being consistent with our brand language in how we talk about and position ourselves
Being consistent with external brand elements like logo, colors, and fonts
Holding the standard throughout their individual teams to ensure brand consistency exists at every turn.

Hold your leaders accountable to this by empowering each department, one by one.

People & HR | Sales | Marketing | Delivery, etc.

Step 1: Give each department leader the brand playbook so they can memorize the key brand language pieces to ensure they talk about the new brand the right way. If you haven’t walked through it with them, share what this new brand means for them and their role.

Step 2: Make sure they have the design elements they need to create department-related materials. Show them where they can access logo files and fonts.

Step 3: Ask the department head to talk to their team (once you roll this out to the wider team, of course) about what the brand changes mean to them as a leader, and what they are excited about regarding the updated brand.

Step 4: Have department heads create a clear Change of Brand Roadmap for their departments. After all, their Stewardship of the new brand is what matters. The execution of the new brand starts and ends with your leadership’s buy-in to the new brand.

This Change of Brand Roadmap should include SMART goals with something similar to the following:

I am going to make sure my team is clearly aligned and unified around the new brand by ______________________.
I am going to make sure that we maintain brand consistency within our team by ____________________________.
Our department can live our our mission, vision, and values by_________________________________________.
We will measure the success of this new brand implementation by
________________________________________________.
We will set one brand-related goal for our department which will be to achieve:
_____________________________ by this date:___________________.

This roadmap will ensure that your department leaders hold their teams accountable for adopting the new brand DNA and maintaining brand consistency. This starts with your leaders.

03 Unveil to your team

Once your core, executive, leadership team has their brand roadmaps ready, it’s time to roll this out to the whole crew!

We advise doing this in four steps:

Step 1: Send a company wide email, or message letting the entire company know that the brand will be changing. Write out the problems behind why the change was needed, and the excitement the leadership team feels around the changes that are going to be made. Talk about what those changes mean for employees and how they will have a better experience at your company because of them. Don’t unveil any imagery in this first message. For now, just notify everyone, get them excited, and provide a clear timeline for when they can start to experience changes.

Step 2: Send out another message inviting everyone to the official unveiling of the new brand. We usually recommend doing something like this:

Throw a teamwide brand unveil party. Make this virtual as well for those who cannot join in person.
Set a date, location, and budget for this event.
Send formal invitations to everyone on the team
Buy 1-2 pieces of new brand swag for each team member

Have your CEO share the why behind the rebrand, the new vision for the company, and unveil the new brand expression to everyone involved.

At or before the end of the event, have a moment where you talk about your clarified mission and vision. Ask each member of the team to sign off on committing to this mission. You can do this a number of ways, but one way that we’ve done this in the past is to have a large poster printed with the new mission written out.
Then, ask everyone to sign their name as a promise to live out your new brand mission as long as they are invested in working at your business. This can be a powerful moment where your people get really clear on who they are and the vision they belong to.
Close the event with a happy hour, or lunch, and hand out swag to everyone in attendance.
We also recommend doing a photoshoot to capture this moment to use in hiring campaigns or marketing materials later on.

Step 3: Honor the past.

Showcase elements of your former brand in a place where everyone in your office can see. Shadow boxes, or frames of some sort usually work well for this. The purpose is to not forget where you came from while you move into the future. This will help mitigate emotional responses from team members who might not like the new rebrand for subjective reasons.

Include photos of team members or past events in this showcase.
Hang this front and center inside your office for everyone to see.

Step 4: Replace the old

Make a checklist of all the physical elements in your office, or around other business locations that have your old branding.
Make a checklist of all the digital/virtual internal team elements that currently have your former branding.
Create a timeline to go through each item on both lists to ensure they now have the new logo and brand elements.
Keep in mind that printed and physical signage items will take longer to swap out than digital materials. We usually recommend starting with the digital stuff first, and then doing the physical things after if you need to.
Have signage and posters made of things like your mission, vision, and values. These are the anchors of your culture and when they are not front and center, they will be forgotten. Put them somewhere everyone can see and honor them by how you live and treat each other.

Step 5: Observe and oversee

Check in with your team leads on a weekly basis. See if they are stuck anywhere in terms of rolling out the new brand or getting their team on board. Help them where you can!
You may discover other things along the way to rally your team not in this guide. Improvise and innovate.

04 Unveil to your customers

Now that your core team is all on board, aligned, and bought into the new vision & meaning behind your brand, it’s time to let the world know.

It’s important that when you announce that your brand is changing to your clients or customers that you do so in a very care-filled and tactful way. If you don’t provide clarity around WHY your brand is changing, your most valuable people will make up a story in their minds that could be potentially negative.

Common fears employees, stakeholders, and even customers have when they see a rebrand:

“They must have been in financial trouble.”

A rebrand can happen for lots of reasons, oftentimes, when things aren’t going well some companies will invest in a brand refresh to spark life back into sales. Because of this, a rebrand can signal that things might not be going great so be sure to communicate why the rebrand is happening so shareholders and clients who trust you don’t freak out.

“They must have been purchased or acquired.”

This can be either good or bad, but if clients or customers think your business is about to experience a regime change at the highest level, it can be a red flag and send clients running. Do what you can to ensure this isn’t the case, and if it is, take the steps needed to mitigate the erosion of trust this could cause.

“They must have some really big changes underway for their business.”

Change, while good in the case of a rebrand, can also signal trouble. Changing the way your business operates, what it offers, or even what it does at its foundation can be really scary to clients who you’ve worked hard to earn trust with. Be sure that you calm these fears before they happen.

Communications Plan

Write a letter from the CEO to all the current clients or customers of your business. Similar to the letter to your employees, this letter should cover the problems behind why the change was needed, and the excitement the leadership team feels around the changes that are going to be made.

Include in the letter what is NOT changing. Things like:

Leadership
Experience
Offerings
Products
Relationships
Office locations
Other things they have come to love and expect when working with you that will stay in-tact

Talk about what WILL change. Could be things like:

Logo
Colors
Website
Touchpoints
Brand positioning
Messaging
Story
Clarified Vision
Clarified Mission

In regards to all the things about your brand that are changing, talk about what those changes mean for clients, and how they will have a better experience working with your company because of them. Don’t unveil any imagery in this first message. For now, just notify your clients & customers, get them excited, and provide a clear timeline for when they can start to experience changes.

Deliver this letter to the channels where your customers live. Assign account reps to send this letter in printed or email form, and have them follow up with your clients to make sure they read the letter and are aware of the changes that are coming.

Along with the letter to clients, make sure you also announce the coming changes, and the letter itself in other areas where your brand is experienced by the market

External client-facing emails
Social media campaign
External client-facing direct mail (if applicable)
External client-facing website popout that temporarily replaces the homepage. Make this page all about the new brand that’s coming and why.

One week after you send this letter, send another followup communication piece to all of your clients and customers letting them know when the brand change is officially taking place. This should happen when your website and market-facing touch points all officially display the new brand.

Make this exciting for clients and customers by procuring welcome packages that contain swag and gifts, so they feel included. After all, this process is about them too.

Share the new Strategy with the world!

Now that your brand is out there in the world, you can give the market even more clarity as to who you are by posting in your channels about all of the things that make your brand who you are.

Your new brand playbook outlines everything that matters when it comes to your brand. Make sure you post on social media about all the new things that make up your brand. We recommend one campaign for each element of your brand playbook that you want the world to know about you.

Organic social media and email campaigns around these core brand elements are a great place to start:

Mission
Vision
Values
New logo
SWAG giveaways

The goal here is not to sell products, advertise, or acquire customers. The goal is to inform and introduce your new brand. If you do this correctly you will get customers, increase, and engagement and all the other things you need to increase your bottom line, but that should never be the goal.

05 The work isn’t done yet!

Set up ongoing brand check-ins for 3-6 months.

Your brand gatekeepers should treat your brand like a newborn baby. Check in on the brand. Are people resonating with the brand? Are they adopting the brand language? Work closely with your HR departments to gauge these things and assess them on a weekly or monthly basis.

Install Feedback Loops

Establish feedback mechanisms to continuously assess the effectiveness of the new brand strategy and make adjustments as needed.
Stay consistent by holding people accountable

Ensure that the new brand identity is consistently applied across all organizational activities, assets, and communications. Hold individuals and teams accountable for upholding the brand guidelines. Department leaders are a great place to start.
Measure Success

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with the brand change objectives. Regularly measure and evaluate the success of the implementation.

How to measure the success of your rebrand

Setting up the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to ensure that a rebrand aligns with brand change objectives. The specific KPIs may vary depending on the nature of the organization and the rebranding goals, but here are some common KPIs to consider:

Brand Awareness:

Tracking website traffic and social media mentions to measure increased visibility.
Conducting surveys or market research to assess brand recognition before and after the rebrand.

Customer Perception:

Customer satisfaction surveys are helpful to gauge how the rebrand is affecting perceptions of your brand. Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer loyalty metrics are also good ways to measure how likely customers are to recommend your brand.

Competitive Analysis:

If your organization is able to, monitoring market share and tracking how your brand's position compares to competitors is a great thing to measure.

Employee Engagement:

Employee satisfaction surveys are really helpful to evaluate how the rebranding has impacted internal morale and alignment with brand values.

Customer Acquisition and Retention:

Tracking new customer acquisition rates are always helpful. Measuring customer retention rates to see if existing customers are staying loyal after the rebrand is a great way to measure the success of a brand build/launch.

Online Engagement:

Monitoring social media engagement, including likes, shares, comments, and follower growth. Tracking website traffic, bounce rates, and time spent on the site to see if the rebrand is driving more online engagement.

Sales and Revenue:

This one is pretty self explanatory, but monitoring sales performance and revenue growth related to the rebrand is always a great KPI. Tracking conversion rates for sales and lead generation on your website are one way to measure this at a more tactical level.

Brand Guidelines Adherence:

Assessing how consistently the new brand guidelines are being followed in marketing materials and communications will always show qualitatively how successful a rebrand was.

Public Relations:

Monitoring press coverage, mentions in the media, and PR success related to the rebrand can be huge indicators of success.

Cost-Effectiveness:

Tracking the costs associated with the rebrand and comparing them to the outcomes achieved are essential for measuring success. How much did you invest in the rebrand? Now look at the outcomes since launching that brand. Measure it!

It's essential to tailor your KPIs to the specific goals and objectives of your rebranding effort. Ensure that the KPIs are measurable, specific, and aligned with your brand change objectives. Regularly assess and analyze these metrics to make informed decisions and adjustments during and after the rebranding process.

06 Keep your people rallied around your WHY!

The Team Alignment Brand Quiz

After your brand playbook has been digested by your team, do something fun to test how well they can articulate why your brand exists.

Send these questions out to your team as a fun quiz. Have them all give their answers. Games or quizzes like this on a regular basis are really fun and engaging ways to increase brand adoption from the inside-out.

Why do we exist?
What is our mission?
What is our vision?
What makes us unique, compared to our competitors?
Why do you come to work every day?

More changes to consider

Rebrands come with a lot of unforeseen changes and challenges.

✅ Employee training: If the rebrand involves a shift in company values, culture, or positioning, employees may need training to ensure consistent messaging and behavior, adding to the costs.

✅ Operational changes: The rebrand might require changes in packaging, labels, and other product-related digital and physical elements. For you, that's offerings, apps, solutions, etc.

✅ Brand communication: Announcing to customers, suppliers, investors, and others involves marketing and PR expenses. Don't have an agile, competent, or strategic marketing team who can own this? Watch out.

✅ Potential customer confusion: A rebrand is a great way to confuse happy customers, especially if they don't immediately recognize the new identity or if they preferred the old one. (Ask KIN...or is it KIA?)

✅ Lost brand equity: If the old brand had significant equity and recognition, rebranding might result in a temporary loss of customer trust and loyalty, impacting sales and revenue (this is more a B2C thing than for businesses like yours...but still. It happens!)

✅ Changes in hiring internally, before, during, or after a rebrand could hinder the success of the project BIG TIME.

Get out in front of all of these potential challenges by assigning leaders to help you mitigate them along the way. What on the list above can you delegate if needed? What can you outsource? Having a list and checking it twice like Santa will give you peace of mind and budget as you roll out your new brand.

Conclusion

Rebrands are a ton of fun. They are also a ton of work. The process after a brand strategy has been created is just as important as the strategy itself. Use this guide as a starting point for thinking about how to communicate the WHY behind your brand change, and as a tool to mitigate the potential pitfalls and miscommunications that often happen when big changes like a rebrand take place.

Always think about the human beings who will be on the receiving end of this massive change. Communicate to them, not at them, and you’ll find yourself at the helm of a massive transformation that your brightest people are eager to get behind.

Me and my team have played a role in every single step of this process for dozens of brand projects. I have seen them fail, and I have seen them be wildly successful. Do not jump into this process without someone to guide you along every step of the journey!

Have questions? Forrest is here to help.

brandon@forrest-co.com