The process of rebranding involves a complex combination of personal and professional factors. To assist you with your own rebranding journey, we thought it might be helpful (and fun!) to show you a behind-the-scenes peek at what our rebranding strategy looked like start to finish. Read on to learn about our rebranding process, marketing strategy, and what’s involved in creating a wow-worthy (re)brand.
The Decision to Rebrand
This 4-part series will cover:
- The reasons behind our decision to rebrand
- Our rebranding strategy – brand purpose, brand promise, and brand positioning
- The evolution of our ideal client avatar
- How we chose the elements of our branding identity including fonts, logo, and color palette
- Our tagline finalists
- The logo we almost went with but ditched last-minute
- Our website redesign
In this first installment of our branding series, we will focus on the reasons behind our decision to rebrand and our overall rebranding strategy. Let’s dive in.
Creating Your Rebranding Story
Rebranding, at its heart, is about creating a new story—one that fits your current values, services, and place in the world. Rebranding is a powerful, transformative act that allows you to adapt in a world where client needs are ever-shifting.
As a former therapist, I see similarities between rebranding and therapy. An individual in therapy transforms and creates a new story in alignment with who they are and what they want moving forward. Similarly, when your business story and goals are not aligning anymore, you must evolve.
This past year has been transformative for most of us.
I watched as many of my clients in private practice, such as therapists, counselors, and psychologists, admirably rebranded or pivoted to stay competitive when the market changed so dramatically due to the pandemic.
I have been honored to help and stand alongside each of you as witness to your journeys, your own personal and professional evolutions, during this time. You are needed, and our rebrand is in dedication to helping you grow your private practices so that others can find and benefit from your services.
You want a thriving practice. Instead of an a la carte logo or website, we recognize that most private practices don’t know what to do with these marketing tools. Our goal is to help you create a sustainable marketing machine that will bring you clients while you sleep.
Our decision to rebrand wasn’t simply a result of adding new services or overhauling our color palette. This transformative decision was based on our personal and professional goals of wanting to help private practices effectively grow their practices.
Our rebrand represents a continuation and evolution of our brand to better serve our clients in private practice.
Reasons Behind Our Rebrand
Why would a company choose to rebrand? Well, there can be a number of reasons but, most often than not, it’s due to the company having undergone some major changes in either its identity or market position and/or direction.
A rebrand can also be undertaken due to the need to adapt that brand for a new market. It might also be the case that a company has just decided that they want a whole new look for their company.
Whatever the reason is, it’s very important to have a well-thought out plan going into any rebranding effort. Otherwise you’re going to run into all kinds of problems and pitfalls when attempting to transition from one brand identity to another.
Let’s look at some of the specific reasons behind our decision to rebrand.
Personal Reasons
As a licensed therapist who grew multiple thriving practices, my mission has always been to help the helpers. Our world needs the helpers. After realizing that our services can help so many private practitioners across industries who have the same business-building struggles, I wanted to rebrand in order to broaden our reach. We are dedicated to helping private practices grow, flourish, and reach more clients who would benefit from their services. Therefore, we needed a new business name to reflect this shift.
Rebranding
Changing our focus from the *who* to the *what*.
Professional Reasons
Instead of offering a la carte logo and website design, I recognize the need to help clients know what to do with these tools within a larger marketing framework.
Rebranding
Changing our focus from a la carte design services to a comprehensive branding and marketing approach to help our clients build thriving practices.
Our Rebranding Strategy
Rebranding encompasses how your client experiences your business and helps consumers know what to expect from your practice. Your brand represents your promise to your clients.
A rebranding strategy is a long-term plan involving a series of goals to set your business apart from others.
- Identify your brand purpose
- Identify your ideal client avatar
- Develop your brand promise
- Develop your brand positioning
- Develop your messaging strategy
- Develop your brand identity including logo, colors, fonts
- Develop your content marketing strategy
- Develop your website
- Implement, track and adjust
Our Brand Purpose
In short, a brand purpose is the reason “why” a business exists.
The brand purpose is the company’s raison d’être, its reason to exist (commonly referred to as “the core of the business”).
Patagonia and Apple are examples of companies with very solid brand purposes. Those brands are purpose-driven companies in every sense of the word: from their product lines, to their core values and business models, to how they engage with customers and partners. Their brand purposes drive everything because they are the reason for which these companies exist.
In order for a company or practice to be successful long-term vs being focused solely on short-term financial gain, it needs to have a strong sense of purpose which is articulated by creating a brand purpose.
Our Original Brand Purpose:
To help therapists grow their practices in order to help more consumers find healing.
Our Revised Rebranding Purpose:
We care about helping private practices thrive so that more consumers can benefit from their services and feel supported in our society.
Our Brand Promise
A brand promise is the experience that a customer can expect from a brand. This includes the ethos, the personality and all of your promises to customers. It is exactly what you want people to feel when they think about your brand. An example of a brand promise might be happiness – a feeling or an emotion.
How do you develop your brand promise? A major part of developing your brand promise is talking to former and current clients to find out how they feel about your brand. Talking to your clients is important because it gives you an insight into their experience and allows you to hear what they have to say. This is particularly relevant if there are problems with the delivery of your product or service – if you know that these issues exist, you can fix them before they grow larger.
Why is a brand promise important? A brand promise communicates the reason why any given customer should buy from a particular business. Once this has been identified, customers will find it easier to identify brands that offer what they want. In other words a brand promise explains how your business benefits its customers in terms of products or services offered, price levels, and quality standards – essentially everything that makes you stand out from the crowd.
Our brand promise did not change much with our rebrand, as our clients routinely tell us that our brand promise is the reason they keep returning and recommending us to their friends and colleagues.
Our Original Brand Promise:
Reliability, professionalism, affordability, ease, and transparency at every step of the design journey.
Our Revised Rebranding Purpose:
Reliability, professionalism, ease, transparency, and confidence at every step of a comprehensive branding and marketing strategy. By growing a team of specialists, we have streamlined our processes and client experience even further.
Our Rebranding Positioning
Brand positioning describes how a brand is different from its competitors. This difference, or meaning must be clear to the consumer; they should know why you are different. A brand positioning creates a perceptual map in the customers’ mind and allows for a differentiation from your competitors. It defines what you sell as well as how you want to be perceived by consumers.
A positioning statement should clearly explain what a brand is and isn’t. It also needs to clarify why your product or service adds value to their lives and how it is different from competitors’ products.
We wanted a positioning statement that reflected our shift from a la carte marketing tools to personalized long-term strategists that will make a difference in your calendar and impact.
Our Original Brand Positioning:
Offers beautiful and effective logo and website design for therapists by a therapist
Our Revised Rebranding Positioning:
I help private practices nail their branding, design high-converting websites, and grow thriving practices through strategic marketing. Let’s get growing.
What Creates a Successful Brand?
Learn the five key steps that your brand needs to have in place to create a successful brand identity.
Coming Up Next
Stay tuned next week for an in depth look at how we revised our ideal client avatar in order to create laser-focused marketing content. Be sure to tune check it out here so you can apply the same process to your own branding journey.
If you want a branding or marketing strategy that will connect, get you noticed, and make your ideal clients choose you over your competitors, contact us. We have helped hundreds of private practices just like yours nail their branding and marketing, book more clients, and build more income.
Let’s grow your brand and get you noticed.
