Business Services
Brand new
How to implement a successful rebranding process
By Carolyn LaWell
Smart Business St. Louis | March 2009
Page 1 of 2
Joe Steiner
chairman and CEO, Color Art Integrated Interiors Inc.
When Joe Steiner saw a
headline that read,
“Reinvent or die,” the phrase hit
him so hard that he went to his
top management and proposed
that they rebrand the company.
When they were done, the
company had a new vision for
growth and would soon have a
new name — Color Art
Integrated Interiors Inc. Steiner,
chairman and CEO of the office
interiors dealer, walked the
company through the rebranding process nearly seven years
ago, and the company continues to grow: Color Art posted
2007 revenue of $92 million
and anticipates $115 million for
2008.
“You have to constantly reinvent yourself and do things differently in the market, or the
competition will either catch up
or pass you,” Steiner says.
The rebranding process starts
with understanding your clients
and the market needs, evaluating your vision and then educating your employees and the
marketplace about the changes,
he says.
Smart Business spoke with
Steiner about how to craft and
implement a new brand for your
company.
Evaluate your vision.
We go
through a process of making
sure where we’re going is still in
alignment with our vision.
The vision meetings have some
structure to them, but we don’t
try to limit any thought or input or
idea that somebody has because
basically, our vision is as broad
or as focused as we make it.
We don’t talk anything about
numbers or goals or objectives.
We just talk about where we
want to go as an organization —
looking at different ways to
grow our business.
If you don’t do something differently, it’s just so hard to grow.
We keep ourselves wide open,
and after we come out of the
meeting with ideas and thoughts
and where we want to go, we
put it up on the whiteboard and
say, ‘Is this in line with our vision?’
Align your new brand with customer and market needs.
As you
look at your core competencies,
you have to say, ‘Who is your
customer?’ You try to take a
look at your core competencies
versus what your customer is
really asking for.
That requires face-to-face visits with customers. It also
requires taking a look at what
they do and trying to cater your
services around their needs.
I think it needs to be well
thought out; that’s why we went
out and hired a firm to help us
through the process.
We hired a firm, and the firm
basically did a marketing study
on all the various businesses we
were in and took all of our competitors and our strengths and
our weaknesses and our threats
and our opportunities and kind
of brought that back and said,
‘How does the marketplace currently look at us, and ideally, how
do we want them to look at us?’
[Ask], who are you? How does the marketplace perceive you?
How do you want the marketplace to perceive you? And, if
those are different, how are you
going to change it?
