The authentic approach to rebranding

Authentic branding. An oxymoron? How could something as artificial as a brand, carefully crafted and sculpted to elicit certain responses in a target audience (at least that’s the hope), be authentic? 

Good question.

And as I ponder it I’m inclined to just give up now and hand this over to ChatGPT to churn out some words about it all, while I go and enjoy a cup of tea in the garden (something I would authentically enjoy much more than writing about brand authenticity). 

However, two recent big rebrands have been playing on the minds of people at Organic. First it was Pepsi’s rebranding and its desire to both retain its popularity with the yoof and connect to its 125 year heritage. 

Then it was Nationwide’s biggest rebrand in nearly 40 years and its simultaneous dedication to ‘stick with the high street’. A commitment that puts it at odds with most high street banks and feels very on-brand for a business that has always prized community.  

This also coincided with a recent rebranding project at Organic where we overhauled an energy subsidiary to give it a completely new look and feel.

So I thought to myself, what the world needs is some more words on branding that nobody will read.

What is brand authenticity?

In essence brand authenticity is pretty much the same as personal authenticity. A brand appears to be authentic when its messaging and marketing (what it says) aligns closely with its offering and its actions (what it does). Think of a person you consider to be authentic. I’d wager that, in the main, they tend to live and breathe the things they profess to believe in. 

It’s really not rocket science, though of course it is very hard to get right. It’s difficult enough for an individual person to always be authentic in every aspect of their life. Think about that authentic person again. Their partner might have a different perspective, because they experience different aspects of them. 

Muddying the waters of brand authenticity further is the fact that brands are not created by one person. Instead there are multiple stakeholders with different agendas, and they (and their agendas) change over time. Brands are also composed of different teams and departments, who may or may not choose to live and breathe the ethos, values, purpose, vision, etc. and so a disjointed and inauthentic experience is delivered to the customer. 

What makes authentic branding? 

As mentioned above brand authenticity stems from the alignment of what a brand says and what it does. So what makes a brand authentic boils down to some fairly simple factors: 

• Consistency – When it comes to authentic branding this is probably number one. There has to be a tight connection between messaging/presentation and the concrete reality of the brand’s actions/experience. There is simply no way a brand can be considered authentic if it tells you one thing (‘Our new platform is so easy to use and will make your life simpler’) and delivers another (‘Thanks for calling our premium rate technical support number. We’re experiencing extremely high call volumes right now…’)
• Honesty – Whether we like a person or not, if at the very least they are honest and straightforward we feel they’re authentic. We might hate what they have to say, but at least we know what we’re getting. So it is with brand authenticity.  
• Clear Communication – An authentic brand should communicate with its customers (keeping the aforementioned consistency and honesty in mind) and ensure that communication involves a whole lot of listening as well as talking. 
• Customer focus – An authentic brand understands who it is trying to reach and how best to enrich their lives with its products and services. We could imagine an authentic person who doesn’t care much about others, if they’re a lone wolf type who believes they are the self-made master of their own destiny (you know, those people who gave birth to themselves, breastfed themselves, educated themselves, then made their millions without using any of daddy’s millions or connections? Yeah, those people). But an authentic brand that isn’t customer-centric?

So, what happens when these things aren’t kept in mind? 

Tropicana: a cautionary tale of rebranding gone wrong

Back in 2009 Tropicana decided it needed to rebrand to modernise and be more inline with today’s consumer (because Lord knows what makes people drink orange juice changes at a frightening pace). So for the princely sum of $35m (once everything was accounted for) they decided to kill off the orange, the straw, and the distinctive logo, and bring the brand bang up to date. 

—>    

And also kill off $20m in sales in 30 days.

Them’s some bitter oranges.  

In a nutshell, Tropicana (and their agency) forgot an important point in authentic branding: being focused on the customer. Customers didn’t like the new branding, and it also made it harder for them to find the juice they loved when they were dragging the kids round the supermarket on a busy Saturday morning. 

New coke and why data can’t always give you the answer

Coca-Cola once felt that it too needed to change. This wasn’t about packaging but the very essence of the product itself. With Pepsi being the choice of a new generation and preferred in blind taste tests, New Coke was born. 

Coca-Cola had some decent data to suggest that people did want a sweeter formula. Pepsi had been making big gains, and Coca-Cola’s own taste tests indicated that customers largely preferred the New Coke flavour to the original recipe. But what this data didn’t tell them was how changing a cherished  product and brand, one that stood for tradition and comfort for a large swathe of its customers, would go down in the real world. 

Within months New Coke was essentially sunk by a public outcry, a deluge of complaints to Coca-Cola’s HQ, and the fact that McDonald’s publicly announced it was switching back to Classic Coke as soon as Coke said it would reintroduce the old formula alongside New Coke. 

So the data might tell us what the customer wants. But a myopic smallness of focus can cause you to miss the complexity of customer desires and responses. 

How to approach an authentic rebrand?

How to rebrand and do it with authenticity isn’t something that can be compressed into a listicle. But here are some things to consider before you begin:

• Be very clear on the reasons why and the end goal – Remember that we, as marketers, quickly get tired of how the brand we work on looks, feels, sounds, and acts. And that is for one simple reason: we deal with it all day. But that’s not how customers (both current and potential) experience brands. They pay little attention to brands and they tend to not think about them much until they are considering a purchase or driven by a need. People are good at ignoring our efforts to grab their attention. So are you rebranding just because everyone internally is bored? Or is it because a rebrand could solve an important business problem? 

• Do your customer research – This should go without saying, but seeing as your branding is a major part of the interface you have with customers you need to see how they may feel about proposed changes. It’s also important to understand changes in customer behaviour that may have impacted your brand, as well as to have carried out wider market research. 

• Get your positioning nailed down – Does the rebrand fundamentally shift your positioning? If so this needs to be developed and agreed on with all the relevant internal stakeholders. 

• Communicate the changes clearly – This is to both customers and employees. If there is no direct messaging explaining what’s changing and why then people get spooked. You’ll make customers more receptive and encourage employees to consistently apply the new brand if you communicate things clearly. 

• Be ready for some blowback (maybe) – You can’t keep everybody happy, and people do love a good social media rant. So be prepared for the fact that some people may not like the changes. It makes sense to be prepared to handle any issues and (as long as you don’t see catastrophic drops in sales) being able to stay the course. 

Authentic branding isn’t easy, and neither is rebranding. But if there are big changes on the horizon for your brand, hopefully you can tackle it head on. 

Or maybe have a word with us about it.