Beyond simply changing a name and updating a logo, rebrands need to be adopted internally to be successful. The danger is that if Facebook fails in this part of rebranding, its image can be damaged further and its brand identity diluted.
However, this is not just a Facebook problem, but a universal business issue. All organisations that are looking to implement rebranded content need to think about how to ensure their employees are staying compliant with new guidelines. This prompts the question, just how difficult is it to facilitate a rebrand and how can leaders ensure success if they decide to take one on?
The Achilles’ heel of rebrands
When organisations begin a rebrand, a large emphasis is placed on external materials such as advertisements and websites. However, internal processes like updating business documents are often overlooked. Templafy recently carried out a report on rebrands, where almost two-thirds of respondents said their team spends more budget and resources on branded public-facing collateral instead of internal.
However, to have a successful rebrand, both the internal and external processes must happen in sync.
This isn’t as simple as one may think – internal adoption is typically a massive issue for brand and marketing teams. In fact, 53% of marketers planning a rebrand are worried about full adoption within their organisation. Ultimately, it’s the phase of a rebrand where many companies fail.
There’s a reason why companies fall short here: internal adoption is not as easy as it sounds. Rolling out new content across global organisations is hugely complex and brand/marketing teams often don’t have the tech solutions in place to ensure this part runs smoothly. Instead of actively serving employees the new content, teams are forced to trust that employees are taking it upon themselves to retrieve the latest branding pieces from a DAM or other centralised storage spaces for content.
The danger of an insufficient internal rebrand rollout is that employees will use outdated content that can negatively impact compliance and brand reputation, which are critical components of establishing a new brand identity.
The root of the problem
The quantity of content is what causes difficult challenges with internal brand rollouts. On average, employees create 10,000 documents – inclusive of emails – per year, and all of these documents need to be on brand. But, updating them manually would cost companies unnecessary time and money, whilst also reducing productivity for employees.
Around 46.1% of respondents in our rebrand report admitted to putting off rebranding due to how much work is involved. Without the right technology in place, marketing, communication and brand teams are forced to spend their time brand policing, rather than actually driving the rebrand forward.
Additionally, if you do not have a strong mechanism to translate the rebrand – to automate the updating of content and information – time is wasted on navigating disconnected document sources and ultimately can result in the production of unregulated, hit-or-miss documents.
To avoid these problems, organisations must consider content enablement platforms. They should make sure they choose a content solution that integrates into daily workflows and delivers user-friendly and intuitive experiences.
Getting ahead of the pack
Content enablement solutions allow for a more seamless transition from an old brand to the new one. Employees are given a simple route to new, approved brand content directly within the applications they’re already working in, like Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. This allows workforces globally to stay on-brand, and compliant, all the time through template automation.
Another key takeaway from automating document assembly via content enablement platforms is that employees become more productive whilst returning ownership of documents to the company. Taking the guesswork out of the content creation process enables compliance with new brand guidelines 100% of the time. This allows organisations like Meta to create a strong and overarching brand identity both internally and externally while mitigating the risk of employees being stuck between the old and the new.
Greg Sheppard is chief marketing officer at Templafy.