Rebranding Your Business After a Scandal

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor

Your branding is the identity of your business. Everything about your business, from your logo to your customer service, plays a role in your brand. Your brand is what people think of in connection to your business. When people think of McDonald’s, they probably think about their golden arches logo and delicious fries.

Consider rebranding your business to help you recover from negative business occurrences.

​Yet, when everything goes wrong at work, your company’s branding might take a major hit. Instead of thinking of your high quality products and having positive thoughts of your business, people will focus on the negatives. Your branding then takes a harmful turn.

If your business is in the midst of a scandal or on the receiving end of some negative PR, you might need to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. If your branding is doing so poorly that most customers only remember the negatives, consider rebranding your business to help you recover.

Start By Addressing the Issue
You had a scandal because your business failed in some spectacular way. Typically, scandals hurt people, whether it’s a string of food poisonings, a faulty part that puts people at risk, or massively bad customer support. So, before you redesign your logo, you need to fix your mistake.

First, take responsibility for what went wrong and tell the whole story. People are already wary and untrusting of business, so trying to pass the blame or disguise it as something else will only hurt future efforts. Tell everybody what you did was wrong, and then detail what you are going to do to fix it.

Have a solid plan ready to make reparations for your mistake and what you will be doing to prevent it from happening again. Keep it simple enough that the average consumer can understand it, yet detailed enough that it’s clear you aren’t all talk.

Then, follow through with your plan. If your mistake hurt people, try to make it up to them. Prevent the mistake from happening again, and work towards improving your business to make your weaker areas much stronger.

Finding a New Target Market or Staying with the Same
When rebranding, you have an opportunity to change who your target market is. Do you want to go after an all new audience or stick with the same? Has your scandal drastically changed how your target market perceives you, overall? Would it be easier to target a new demographic or win back your old customers? If you built up a strong community around your business, did you lose all of their trust from your scandal, or are your strongest supporters still there?

These are all questions you need to answer before rebranding. Everything else will be influenced by what target market you are going after. If you are going after a new market, what lessons can you learn from the past to hit the ground running with them?

New Logos, Designs, and Color Schemes
After you’ve corrected your mistakes and cleaned up your business, then it’s time to start building your business back up. If your scandal was particularly bad, you might want to part ways with nearly all of your previous branding. You want to stop people from associating you with the scandal, meaning revamping all of your old marketing.

Before calling up your graphic designer though, you need to have a plan. Simply changing a logo isn’t enough to reset your branding — you need to take it in a new direction. A good approach is to focus on what your company’s current bad image is and create marketing to combat it. Looking to be seen as a green and wholesome company? Pick fonts, design a logo, make design choices to reflect a softer image for your business.

It’s important, though, to keep enough of a connection to your previous brand that the changes won’t utterly confuse customers. Your new logo should have some similarities to the old, your website should feel fresh but not confusing, and ads should still be relevant to your target market.

Simplify Your Business and Products
When growing a business, you’ll develop new products and services. This can include creating upgraded versions of products, branching out into new industries, and more. But, the more complicated your business becomes, the more confused customers become.

Rebranding is a good opportunity to simplify your business and products to cut down on clutter. A good example of this was FedEx back in 1994. They had too many delivery services at the time, and rebranded both their logo and services to be more simple. Instead of dozens of delivery products, they slashed it down to a few, all easy to understand.

Push Marketing Hard to Get Your New Brand Out There
Once you’ve done the work of setting up your rebranding, push hard to get it out to your target market. Show that you are a brand new company that’s moved past your scandal and ready to start fresh. Pay for advertising, either digital, physical, or both (depending on your market) to get your name and brand out into the public.

Content marketing is another aspect you need to push hard. While updating your website’s design, create new content that aligns with your updated branding. Refocus your content strategy with your blog to support your new message and possibly new target market.

After some time, evaluate how effective your branding is. Conduct research with those in your target market to see if they like the changes being made. Then compare that information against your current sales to see if you are actually finding success. If something isn’t working, see if some minor tweaks can help out.
​