Complete customised re-branding exercise

Seperating your brand from the bland

Branding is far more than simply creating a new logo and tweaking colours around. Take the rebrand of PricewaterhouseCoopers to ‘pwc’. According to statements released by the firm, the rebrand follows a three-year strategic review of the firms positing in the market. This was not a simple name change and visual makeover, but a renewal and freshening of the brand’s value and it’s positioning going forward.

What is a ‘brand’?

Branding is far more than the visual identity – name, term, logo, design or colours – associated with a product or a service. Branding encapsulates the psychological aspects like thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs values, attitudes and perceptions that they wish customers to associate with their product or service. This is not simply to educate a consumer base for the sake of it, far from it. The motivation is to make customers feel that your brand has certain qualities and characteristics’ that make it unique, makes the customer feel special, and enable you to charge a premium in the process.

Branding and professional services

Branding is a complex arena, most fully developed in B2C and has historically been supported by significant regional, national and global advertising. Coca-Cola, an obvious name has an advertising budget of more than $2 bn. Within professional services, branding is less well understood.  A professional services brand has three components:

Positioning      /      Behaviour      /      Image

Any firm looking to manage their brand effectively must understand how these three critical elements work together. We say it all the time, accountants are unique and branding is another example of this face. Unlike Coca – Cola or many other B2C markets image is possibly the most important element to promote, for accountants it is the least important of the three. Yet many firms branding exercise starts here, either because that is what they are told or because it’s physically tangible change.

When to re-brand?

When should an accountancy firm rebrand? If your objective is a new logo, improved design of your website and brochures, we would love to help, but this is not rebranding. The primary reason firms rebrand is at the time of a merger or following a significant shift in the firm’s strategy.