Customers are notoriously brand-loyal. If you plan on changing your brand name, make sure that you roll it out cleverly.
By Craig Falck for Africa Report
1. Advance Warning: Don’t spring the surprise on people. If you do, they’ll run away.
2. Research: You don’t really wake up one morning and say to yourself, “Hey, I know what I’ll do today – I’ll take my best-selling brand, change the name and hope people keep buying it.” This is something that needs to be planned, researched and thought out. You will need to conduct market research, have meetings and give out questionnaires, all of which will help you decide if it’s a worthwhile move to make, as well as which direction you should go in when it comes to names.
3. Promote Change: Once you’ve got your name and you’re 100 percent certain that it’s the right one, you need to draw up a marketing and advertising campaign that will let your customers know what you’re doing with their favourite product. Perhaps single out a new advancement in the product (it can be as simple as changing colours from yellow to green) and emphasise “new and improved” along with the new name, while adding “better than you’ve ever used” or something similar.
4. Start Small: Find a small store to introduce the newly branded product and see what the reaction is. Once you’ve got results, you might find that the market doesn’t like the new-style goods and you’ll need to head back to the drawing board. If sales actually improve, you’re lucky and you can go ahead with the rest of the plan.
5. Go Big: Introduce the new-look products in your bigger stores and make a big deal of them. Have in-store promoters handing out vouchers or doing displays and demonstrations for the customers. Make sure that you have both the new and old items side by side – some customers will want the tried-’n-tested product no matter how much you tell them the new one is the same…
6. Feedback: Conduct feedback research and continue to measure the brand’s performance with its new name.
Customers are creatures of habit. Once they find something they like, it’s very difficult to switch. However, if you need to change brand names for whatever reasons, you need to prove to them that the product’s still the same, if not better than ever, if you want them to keep coming back. If you do it properly, you might even find a whole new customer base
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