Rebranding with Research

by Kira Klaas and Nicky DePaul

Rebrands are hard. And expensive. Everybody has *feelings* about the way to get there — not to mention the results.

So how can you make navigating strong opinions easier? When rebrands feel personal, how do you get everyone on the same page, early and often? And if you’re the one driving this thing, how do you guarantee that you’ll land a rebrand that customers love?

Researchers (UXR, UR, etc.) are experts on gathering information needed to make hard business decisions, usually working in support of design or product teams. But difficult decisions exist across the company. Why should those experts only help a few teams? The research/brand partnership is a non-traditional one, often overlooked, that can heavily inform and positively impact the customer-facing results of long-term brand work.

In this piece, we’ll share a few of our tactical tips, strategic framings, and personal anecdotes from each of the five phases of a rebrand (that we really wish somebody told us first):

1. Recognize the need to rebrand
2. Build consensus to change
3. Build the brand together
4. Validate what you’re building
5. Evaluate your success

And we hope to leave you with with two takeaways:

1. That non-traditional partnerships, like the one between research and brand, serve to elevate the impact of customer voice in decision-making
2. How these partnerships raise the influence of research and design teams in decision-making

Recognizing the need to rebrand

Sometimes rebranding feels like a self-help exercise: The first step is to recognize the need to change (your brand). Meditate on it a moment, take a hard look at what’s not working about your brand right now, think about your own feelings on it — then come back to business objectives. Understanding why you’re doing this is a key moment of business strategy.

Companies sink or swim on the strength of their brand — your brand is everywhere, tangible and intangible at the same time. Changing your brand’s story and perception means you need to investigate where you’ve been as a brand and where you’re trying to go — and again, that takes being honest with yourself. The delta therein is not a given.

It takes a close examination of your customer, your positioning, your market, and your competition (today and in the future). More importantly, it takes courage to avoid explaining away gaps between your vision and reality.

Our experience at Brex is illustrative: The company launched in June ’18 with a massive billboard campaign across the Bay Area that got us a lot of eyeballs, fast. This is Brex back at the beginning.

Lots of black and orange, heavy type, and sharp angles — we were intentionally going for an aesthetic that felt exclusive to a degree and would appeal to young tech founders. We used unambiguous messaging like “the first corporate card for startups” and de facto branded ourselves as a “startup for startups.”

For a while, that’s exactly what we were going for. Branding for a niche served us well, leading to fast growth and a high valuation.

But as we grew, prospects told our Sales team that they didn’t consider themselves startups — anymore, at least. They were on to the next phase of growth. And however good our product was, the fact that we were positioned as a startup building solutions for other startups just didn’t resonate.

While messaging hyper-targeted at a specific niche helped us build our initial market awareness, we held aspirations of global operations and brand recognition, of being the first place people turn when starting a new business or growing an existing one.

We knew we needed to change the “startup for startups” perception in order to grow. There was a new story — a new look, a new tagline, and new messaging — waiting for us to figure them out.

Build consensus to change

The feedback from prospective leads gave our Brand team hypotheses around how to evolve, but we didn’t have internal consensus around a full rebrand, especially at the executive level.

They tapped the Research team to gather more inputs to determine the level of investment. Specifically, we needed to understand:

1. The echo chamber of our internal assumptions
2. Existing customer perceptions
3. Future market requirements

Because we felt we understood the qualitative data, we led off with a survey across each audience: internal employees, existing customers, and non-customers (through YouGov, an excellent third-party vendor).

We started with a simple question: How would you describe Brex?

Right away, the answers revealed a major perception gap: Brex employees described us as bold, sleek, and aggressive, while customers described Brex as easy, simple, and professional.

Then we compared psychographic differences between current customers and future markets, and saw that the businesses we were serving today would be fairly disparate from who we would be serving in the future. A brand designed for someone who describes themselves as “highly analytical” can turn out pretty different from a brand designed for someone who describes themselves primarily as “creative,” for example.

We also saw major differences in what these segments look for in financial services brands. Our customers, for example, cared more about a brand being “tech-driven” (51%) than the broader market (28%). No surprise, we were a startup for startups. This mattered because our internal team believed being tech-driven was core to our brand… but would that brand carry us out of our niche market?

And, we identified loyalty and churn drivers, primarily within our future markets, to match brand concepts to tangible business metrics… AKA dollars, the language of most decision-makers. It’s easier to be part of a decision when you speak the language, so if you’re a designer, researcher, or marketer out there, try to tie what you’re learning and proposing back to the bottom line, wherever possible (and it’s usually possible).

So now, we had hard data that revealed gaps and opportunities in our brand goals — necessary to make a case for the investment a rebrand would require. The findings, combined with internal discussions, gave our executives the confidence to give the green light to hire a design agency.

Build the brand together

Our primary criteria in agency selection were that they shared our “dream big” vision, were local to one of our offices, would treat us as a priority, and of course, fit our budget.

Once we found that partner, the first thing we did to onboard them was to share what we’d learned — the internal biases we’d uncovered, our aspirations for the brand, and as much ethnographic insights about our customers as possible.

We held weekly sessions at their studio to review expressions for the brand borne from the learnings we’d gathered, which we then presented to and discussed with our executive team.

Note that it’s rare for user researchers to continue to be in the room beyond the foundational stage of a rebrand — in our case, the lead researcher on our team did. These sessions were key in creating a venue for the customer voice to influence executive decisions. We noted earlier that the bottom line is one top priority — words or symbols with emotional resonance is another. Brands are often an expression of a leader’s vision — in other words, they’re often deeply personal.

No matter what team you’re on, raising your impact requires recognizing executive priorities and prioritizing them. When you’re at the table when these topics are being discussed, your team’s presence and voice grows.

But it’s healthy to embrace that executives are the final decision-makers, no matter how passionately you believe in another route. And in our case, the direction our partner agency was heading didn’t match our leadership’s vision.

We fired them.

This was a really hard moment. We felt like we’d failed. While Kira had worked on other brands before, this was her first time owning an entire rebrand, at this scale, with an agency she had personally backed.

On the research side, we did some soul-searching. Were our methods right? Was the data wrong? Would the customer voice end up having a seat at the table?

How often have you seen personal preference or bias take precedence over empirical data? It happens all the time, and can be demotivating to those who believe that listening to customers is the key to success.

Now let’s get a little cliche. As is so often said, failure is the best growth moment. How could we reframe? We focused on the fact that the consensus we’d worked hard to build early on remained — the entire team still believed in the need to continue developing our brand.

We also took a breath, personally: “Whatever came before, start fresh now.” Try saying it to yourself the next time you’re feeling failure or insecurity, whether at work or otherwise. Try saying it to yourself right now. How does it feel?

One of the tougher moments we experienced was that there was no sudden epiphany about what to do next to accompany this shift in strategy. We realized that if this rebrand was going to be successful, we needed to clearly define the internal vision, more than we thought we had. We recognized that we still didn’t understand exactly what our leadership was looking for, and that a lot of their feedback had been coming from the gut. We welcomed this reality, and recommitted to empathizing with our stakeholders. In many ways, research and design are all about helping people bridge the gap between gut feelings and data. Listening, asking questions, and summarizing are the building blocks of innovation.

So before we even thought about restarting the design work, we spent two months revising our brand strategy — going back to the basics, just words on a page — with our leadership team. We focused on defining a new company mission statement that would become the foundation of our brand moving forward, along with our core brand idea, audience, elevator pitch, and personality traits.

And because another challenge we had faced was not knowing when an aspect of the work was “done,” or fully signed off on, we also asked our executives to commit to a 48-hour turnaround time on feedback. That’s essential to maintain your momentum and avoid costly alignment delays.

And that worked! Our executives felt proud of the mission we settled on. We selected a new agency.

But the second chance was probably going to be the last chance. One executive said as much, joking to our new agency, “If this doesn’t work, we can just keep using the existing brand.” We knew this time was going to work.

Validate what you’re building

As the new visual and messaging systems took shape over the next few months, it was time to validate what we were building with those same audiences we’d started with: internal employees, current customers, and our future markets.

We used remote research tools like Lookback and Figma to run usability tests on our visual system and specific assets, and conducted qualitative research to validate new messaging. These inputs helped our internal design team combine what the agency was providing with more detailed feedback to ensure we kept the end user’s lived experience central in our work.

We also gathered feedback from internal leaders, less to use as an input and more as a chance to build the next round of consensus implementing the new brand.

Evaluate success

At the start of our rebrand, we’d identified a need for a trustworthy, tech-driven, helpful, and here-to-stay brand. As we neared the end of our agency contract, we evaluated our new brand through that lens, and felt confident we’d achieved our goal with:

1. A mission that clearly articulates what we’re building while speaking to the aspirations of businesses everywhere
2. A new logo and design system that connotes trust and stability, without losing our tech-forward roots
3. A visual and editorial brand system focused on making our customers the hero

Huge difference right?

Conclusion

This took nearly a year, and we’re so proud of the results. As you head back to your day, we hope you remember:

1. Non-traditional research partnerships elevate the customer voice. As researchers and brand experts, it’s our job to tie decisions made at the company back to the lived experience of the customer, and make sure all teams are aware of the impact their decisions have on the people on the other side.
2. These partnerships give research, brand, and design teams more influence in that decision-making. The more people you work with, the more trust you build at your organization, and if you can earn the trust of your executives, it sets a precedent that your work is a key input with value to everyone.

Take a look around your company. Where are there big decisions being made? Where are big decisions being made without customer input? Those are the places you might want to start. Approach those teams. See if you can help. Because if you can, you perpetuate the virtuous cycle that we’re all working towards: a better experience for the customer at the end of the day.

This article was originally presented as a keynote at the UXRAnywhere Conference and is available to watch via UXR Collective.