If you haven’t heard of Wendy Piersall and eMoms at Home, you may want to turn off Donald Trump and The Apprentice and tune in to a real success story.
Wendy launched eMoms at Home as a hobby. Now, just a few years later, the site is a seven-channel blog network and a legend in blogging and home-business circles.
This month, Wendy is attempting to pull off one of the most difficult tricks a business can undertake: rebranding. And she’s doing it with incredible success. The eMoms blog network is now known as Sparkplugging, so named because the bloggers and readers of the site are “Spark Plugs” — people who make things happen.
Rebranding may be the most complicated and most risk-prone challenges of a business owner. You take a company or a product that people have come to know, trust and love….and you change it. Risk? Yeah. You screw this up and everything you’ve built disappears and you have to start from scratch.
I’m working now on a branding campaign for a new loose leaf tea provider. I can’t get into the details, but let’s just say they’re positioning themselves as the Mercedes-Benz of tea. The PRstore store literally holds the fate of this company in its hands. And here’s the thing: This isn’t a rebrand. We’re literally building the brand from scratch.
Good thing they came to PRstore, a team of marketing professionals with the writing, design and branding expertise to pull this off.
Sometimes, like in the case of Sparkplugging, rebranding works. Ask John “Survivor” McCain about rebranding. Or Steve Jobs at Apple. NPR has a great comparison of the latter two. Sometimes, however, a rebranding campaign flops. Miserably. Tom Cruise, anyone?
A re-brand includes more than a new logo. It is essentially a new identity. Consider the following:
- Logos
- Taglines
- Color schemes
- Fonts
- Company name
- Brand promise
- Verbal descriptors of your company
- Packaging
- Buildings/interiors
Of these, brand promise is perhaps the most difficult for many companies to grapple with. What is it? It is your “essence.” It is your philosophy and beliefs articulated in words and pictures. It is the definition of you. And it is (or at least should be) yours and yours alone.
PRstore is carving out a niche as an “Imagineer” of corporate identities. If your company is considering a rebranding, contact a PRstore to learn how our copywriting and design teams can help.