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Get Buy-In for Your Brand Project

Brand Project Buy-In

You know how important your brand identity is to the success of your business, which means you’re willing to do what it takes to keep it polished, current, and buttoned up. But when you need budget and manpower to revamp your brand, your buy-in isn’t enough. You’ve got to get everyone from your team and leadership on board.

When you need budget and manpower to revamp your brand, your buy-in isn’t enough.

This is no easy feat. Everyone brings their own objections, hopes, and expectations to the table when it comes to a rebrand. But, armed with the right angles and a firm understanding of the benefits of a solid brand, you can get executive buy-in on your brand project while also rallying the rest of your team.

We’ve outlined a few angles, but regardless of which tack you take, your branding agency should be able to help you sell through the value of your project. It’s not every day you go through a rebrand, but they’ve seen it all. They know the reservations and they’ve seen the positive results. Part of their job is to understand the power of a solid brand foundation, so ask them to use that knowledge to help you get your own job done.

The Benefits of Branding: Understanding the True ROI of Brand Work
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Benefits of Branding

Brand Can Solve Our Pain Points

One of the most common objections to a brand project is “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” What many don’t realize is that a great deal of the challenges an organization faces can be directly tied back to brand. You just have to figure out which ones matter most to your executives and the rest of your team before pitching a brand project as the solution.

Leadership

Maybe you’re struggling with stagnant sales, disconnected messaging, or misperceptions throughout the marketplace. A strong brand can help you overcome all these challenges. By helping leadership see areas that need improvement and presenting brand as a solution, you can start building the case for a rebrand with your executive team.

Team

Your team might care about some of the same issues leadership struggles with, but beyond these concerns, they probably want to know how their day-to-day will be impacted by a rebrand. If your brand lacks definition or useable elements, it can make it difficult for your team to do their individual jobs. A solid brand can help everyone on your team carry a unified voice and look across all your materials, empowering everyone from writers to designers to marketing specialists to sales to do their job better.  

Your Agency’s Role

Your agency has likely helped a number of companies overcome the very same pain points you face. Ask them to share data and case studies you can use to support your case when you start these discussions with your executive and internal marketing teams.

Brand Reflects Our Understanding of Our Audience

Brand does not exist in a vacuum. It’s always been a two-way street between what you put out into the marketplace and how your audience perceives you. If you hope to create brand loyalty and attachment, you’ve got to understand your audience.

Leadership

The only way to know where your audience stands is to ask them. In some cases, it’s easier to get leadership to sign on for a research project that will help them understand where your company stands with your audiences. If your brand is broken, being able to show feedback that identifies a misperception or brand gap with quantifiable evidence can be compelling for leadership. It can help them see challenges as a company-wide brand issue rather than marketing’s issue.

Team

When your marketing team has the right tools to work with, their deliverables and campaigns will perform better. Brand messaging, voice, and visuals that connect with your audiences will make it easier for them to move the needle in areas where they may have been struggling before. If your brand resonates with your audience, your marketing efforts will, too.

Your Agency’s Role

Your agency can help you undertake a brand discovery project and even conduct the research. Having a third-party ask the questions not only ensures your audience is giving honest feedback, but it also removes any bias from the interpretation of the answers.

A Rebrand is an Opportunity to Take Ownership

For most people in an organization, it can feel like they’ve inherited a brand and they just have to work with what they have. A rebrand is a chance for everyone from leadership to marketing to customer service to have a sense of ownership over the brand and the future of the organization.

Leadership

One of the best ways to get executive buy-in is to appeal to their need to make their mark. They likely were brought into the organization to shake things up and make some changes for the better. A rebrand is an opportunity for them to do this in a big way. It’s also a chance to establish authenticity within the brand. Your business values likely shift with every changing of the guard, a rebrand gives you the chance to re-align brand values with your business values at every level.

Team

This particular benefit of a rebrand extends well beyond your marketing team. Everyone within the organization needs to be able to stand behind the brand, and a rebrand project gives them the opportunity to have a real connection to the brand they’re supporting. Giving them the chance to be a part of the process and letting them know their opinion matters makes it easy for them to get behind the project.

Your Agency’s Role

Factoring in the opinions and perspectives of everyone in your organization can become unwieldy. Your brand agency should be practiced when it comes to including disparate groups in the rebranding process. Ask them to outline a process that considers all your key players without weighing down the project.

Branding Is Our Chance to Seize a Position in the Marketplace

The return on investment in this realm is indisputable. A brand that connects with your audience and represents you favorably in the marketplace is the strongest tool you have when it comes to claiming a stand-out position. If your industry has become watered down by dated brands making the same promises, a rebrand empowers you to rise above the crowd.

Leadership

The executive team understands your marketplace. They know the competition. But they can also fall in the trap of “if it’s good enough for our competitors, it’s good enough for us.” It can be easier to play it safe rather than risk upsetting familiar waters for your audience. But if you have your brand research in place, you can set forth a branding strategy that will keep audiences engaged while making a stand-out impact. By explaining this to your leadership, you can make them feel more comfortable with the next move.

Team

Your team may also have grown overly comfortable with the existing brand. Having to learn a new voice, logo rules, color palette, etc., can be overwhelming. Still, a new brand can also help them be more adventurous. Having new parameters to play within can add a level of excitement to the job while also giving them the opportunity to see how their work pops in the marketplace.

Your Agency’s Role

Your agency team should give you the tools to make your leadership more comfortable with the change: testimonials from rebrand clients who improved their ROI, competitive examples that demonstrate the sea of same across the industry, etc. They can also inspire your marketing team with samples of revamped brands and examples of how tweaks here or there can help them keep things fresh.

It’s extremely important to get buy-in from your executive team and your marketing team. Leadership holds the purse strings, but the rest of the team holds the fate of the new brand in their hands. The best way to get buy-in across the board is to keep communication open, get out ahead of the objections, and engage everyone as a brand steward for the new brand.

Eliza Green
Eliza Green
Passionate about all aspects of content, Eliza has spent much of her career building an understanding of the nuanced needs of various audiences across nearly every vertical imaginable. She leverages this understanding to bring compelling, engaging content to pages of both the digital and print persuasion.