Let’s talk about branding or rebranding an existing business.

This is one of my favorite topics within branding because I like starting with what the client already has, rather than starting from scratch.

Fair warning: I’m about to stuff this post with a passel of unrelated metaphors. I often think in wild and elaborate metaphors. I find them immensely useful when explaining a concept that’s unfamiliar to my reader. Hopefully they’ll work for you here!

Is it time to rebrand your business or reposition your brand?

They say all change starts from within and when it comes to branding or rebranding a business, it’s true!

Before you choose a new color palette, commission a new logo design, or start overhauling your service menu, there’s some connective tissue [pulling a metaphor from the hallowed pages of Grey’s Anatomy — the medical tome, not the TV show, though I adore it and Shonda Rhimes, too] that must come into place first to cushion those newly growing bones.

Initiating a rebrand starts, in my view, with shifting your brand conversation.

What is ‘brand conversation’?

The first layer of a rebrand is a shift in the brand conversation. What is a brand conversation? For the purposes of a business that markets itself online (or even offline), brand conversation equals the subject matter your business takes on, the topics you address under the subject umbrella, the motifs you lean on, the themes you use, and generally what the brand is about.

This is the part of branding I find most satisfying. It’s identifying the threads of an ongoing conversation that feel like they have the most electricity in them. The tripwire, so to speak, that cracks everything open. If you haven’t found your tripwire yet, it’s OK. I think that’s, like, a twice in a career type of thing.

If you want to rebrand or reposition your business, start on the level of content — the words on your website, the words in your blog posts, the affect of your video editing (yes, I mean affect with a hard emphasis on the first syllable, like in Ben Affleck, not effect, though the former influences the latter), the styling of your Instagram images.

Rebranding with content allows you to reposition your business from the inside out, rather than visually from the outside in.

When you know that you want to shift your positioning in the marketplace or start talking to a different market or segment of the market, the first best way to do that is to write about it. You can shift your brand quickly or you can unfold the shift slowly over the course of a year. You can accomplish a repositioning in a 3 to 5 blog post series or in a 10 to 20 post series. 

The first step is to find the link or the connection (the connective tissue) between the thing you have been talking about and the new thing you want to talk about.

There is always a connection.

I repeat: there is always a connection.

How do I know? Because these (maybe) seemingly disparate things — your ‘before’ topics and themes and your ‘after’ topics and themes — both originate in you and with you and your experience. It’s not that they have to be personal, and the connection you make for your readers doesn’t have to be a personal one. (You don’t have to write the post that starts, “So I’ve been blogging and teaching about X for the past 3 years, but one day I realized it’s really Y that matters! And so now, I’ll be talking about Y!”)

The connection you explore with your readers through your shifting content might be related by topic, by industry, or even by energetics, by the unseen forces that tie these things together.

You can also start your rebrand by hinting or suggesting on social media. I don’t suggest you be overly quiet about it, though. There’s no need to tease your audience, unless that’s your bona fide style; maybe it is if you have a high Playfulness, Power, or Love Voice Value, all of which could inhabit the energy of teasing, though in very different ways.

The key is to release some minnows into your already well tended pond. (Last metaphor of the post, I promise.) Let them start feeding on your pond’s algae. (Couldn’t resist getting that in there.) Let them adapt to the ecosystem you’ve already created. (Aaaaand there’s that.)

Before you book your designer for a visual rebrand, outline a new service offering, or even change your title, consider what it is you want to SAY through this retooled brand of yours — and let content lead the way. It’s the most organic way to start shifting the brand that speaks for the business that contains the work you do.

Our new 4-week course melds practical content strategy with ephemeral brand voice to help you craft a brand conversation that really sings. (Ooh, one last metaphor.)

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

Have you ever rebranded or repositioned your business? How did you start the process? What did you do, content-wise, to support your brand shift?