The right impression | The economy presents opportunities for rebranding, but the bigger question is whether your company is ready
Photo/Heidi Kim
Steve Morris of Kennebunk Savings Bank, left, and President Brad Paige, say the intent of the bank's rebranding effort is to make people aware of its multiple services, including investment advising and insurance
In the last few weeks, people around town have walked up to Kennebunk Savings Bank President Brad Paige to shake his hand or pat him on the back. “They’ve congratulated me on the purchase of Morris Insurance,” Paige says.
Paige, almost certainly, is polite and gracious back. But the problem is Kennebunk Savings Bank acquired Morris Insurance 11 years ago. It’s just that most people never put the two businesses together, despite years of local ads touting the bank’s expanded offerings. “It’s amazing to me how many people didn’t realize we offered insurance and investment services, even existing customers,” Paige says.
To change that misperception, Kennebunk Savings has undertaken a major rebranding effort. It renamed its insurance branch Kennebunk Insurance. And it also renamed its four-year-old investment arm, once called Kennebunk Financial Services, to Kennebunk Investment Services to underscore its purpose.
With these three names now clearly belonging to the same company, the 138-year-old bank has also remade its brand, blending the three services into the bank’s updated identity, Paige says.
Another company in Falmouth, Tyler Technologies, has also just wrapped up a rebranding push. Like Kennebunk Savings, Tyler Technologies felt customers were not aware of its array of public sector software offerings, added over the years through company acquisitions, according to Lee Marquis, a marketing director for Tyler. “We needed to create a strong brand that we could own that resonated across the company and incorporated all our products,” he says.
The timing of these two intensive makeovers, when the economy’s heartbeat has slowed, could work in the companies’ favor. Paige says the lull of a downturn provides a quiet environment in which people pay more attention to such things as a renewed brand. “It feels like the right time to do it, it’s the right environment,” he says. “When the economy is flying along, a lot of information is flying along, and people are busy.”
Steve Morris, president of Kennebunk Savings Insurance, says in the past 11 years, the bank subsidiary has already increased its clients from 2,000 to close to 8,000. With the rebranding, Morris anticipates seeing those numbers climb even more.
“So there has been organic growth simply because of the affiliation with Kennebunk Savings, but we expect that trend to deepen and increase,” Morris says.
A recession can also paradoxically open up new business opportunities. Duncan Stout, a partner with CD&M Communications, a marketing firm in Portland, says companies that are on their toes will jump to meet new opportunities, and one way is by retooling their messaging.
Paige says the new brand is intended to put Kennebunk Savings in a competitive position once the economy rebounds. “We want to make sure we come out of the current times with a strong brand and strong brand messages,” he says.
Time for a makeover
When the phones stop ringing or customers begin drifting away, companies naturally begin to wonder whether their brand needs refreshing. But before rebranding, which can be costly and even emotionally taxing, companies need to ask whether it’s the right solution or the right time.
Weakened or changing economies can trigger brand doubt in companies. Or companies might simply think their logo looks outdated, or their color scheme is off; or if a competitor has just remade its brand, a business might suddenly see its own logo lacking in comparison. But those are “the wrong reasons,” to rehabilitate your brand, according to Cary Weston, co-founder of Bangor-based marketing and communications firm Sutherland Weston. The right time is when “you really know who you are, you have a vision and a mission,” Weston says.
Even if a company comes prepared with a strong sense of purpose, it will still glean new insight during a rebranding process. “If you do the rebranding right, you challenge everything you do, everything you say,” Weston says. “You challenge everything. It’s a very painful process because people as a species are very resistant to change.”
At the heart of rebranding is, of course, change. These changes can be ones already implemented in the company, but not reflected in the brand, such as in the cases of Kennebunk Savings Bank or Tyler Technologies. They can also refer to a company’s ambitions. “Brands are aspirational,” Stout, at CD&M, points out. “You can find pieces that are true about you and about where you want to go.”
Both Stout and Weston say no matter if the economy’s sluggish or booming, it’s wise for companies to revisit their brand every two or three years — not necessarily for a whole-hog overhaul, but rather for just minor tweaks and repairs.
In fact, Weston says he and his partner the other day agreed it was time to take a step back at their own firm. “Most people work in their business and not on their business,” Weston says. “Just this week, Elizabeth [Sutherland] and I said, ‘We need to breathe and make sure we’re on the right path.’” They plan to carve out a day or weekend when the whole staff can get together and evaluate what they do well, what they don’t do well, and where new opportunities lie and how they can meet them.
And this kind of conversation is branding, Weston says, which, when boiled down, is basically about “who am I and who cares?” Broadening the definition a bit more, Weston says a brand is “an undying commitment to everything you are, from a million-dollar ad campaign to the way you answer the phone. … The brand is a collection of an amazing amount of things; it is everything that the company does to represent its personality … it is so many levels of impressions.”
The nuts and bolts
To retool its identity, Kennebunk Savings Bank started off last spring by conducting research on how the company defines itself, gathering perspectives from employees, customers and non-customers.
“You get at the core of who you are,” Paige says, which for his bank is about customer service and its range of services. After establishing statements about its foundational beliefs, the bank worked with CD&M Communications, which helped develop a new “Ask us” advertising campaign, highlighting the bank’s responsiveness to customer questions. The bank also redesigned its logo, modernizing its old-fashioned rendering of an elm tree to one with “pop,” says Paige.
Tyler Technologies underwent a similar process, starting with a company evaluation. “We identified our competition, our competition’s strengths and weaknesses, who we were at our core, our strengths, personality traits, values, history — we looked at everything,” Marquis says.
The company also conducted research with help from an outside agency that analyzed its customers, competition and the company. At the end of the research phase, it launched the creative stage, coming up with a new logo and slogan. The company tagline changed from “Tyler works,” which was based on the idea that the company provided infallible products, to “Empowering people who serve the public.” Tyler’s market niche is selling technology products for schools and government.
Both companies worked on their websites as well, with Tyler “reskinning it,” as Marquis says, to make it graphically resemble the rest of the company’s materials. The content will be updated in 2010, he adds.
Kennebunk went a few steps further. “It is absolutely night and day,” Paige says. He says the old web site was like a corkboard, where everything the bank wanted to communicate with customers was tacked on like an extra pamphlet. “It got very busy and hard to read,” Paige says. “Now we have a fresh, crisp, clean website. It’s evolved from a billboard to more of a portal.”
Both companies also planned major internal launches to broadcast their new brands to employees.
“We wanted to make it a grand unveiling and have a lot of excitement,” Marquis says. “Our employees are our brand ambassadors ... A rebranding will never work if it doesn’t ring true or your employees are not behind it.”
Both Tyler and Kennebunk Savings believe they will see increased business from their brands, especially because they were crafted to help people gain more awareness of everything the businesses have to offer.
Weston says a rebranding process is successful when a customer has a similar understanding of a company as those who work there. “At the end of the day, if you’ve done the rebranding right, you’ve shed your skin, you’re stronger, more committed and you have a clearer understanding of who you are and your vision,” he says.
Rebecca Goldfine, a writer based in Dresden, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
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