391: The Art of Rebranding- with Jim Heinigner

[00:00:23] Lori Highby: Hey everybody, Lori Highby here. Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast. Our show notes are found at socialcapitalpodcast. com. To you, the listener, I want you to know that I appreciate you and I'm thrilled to have you here for another episode. If there's ever anything that I can do to support you, please reach out.

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The topic of relationships ties in very closely with marketing. That's why I am bringing on marketing experts with a variety of backgrounds to help you learn and grow from. Today's guest Is Jim Heinigner. I believe I said that right. He is the rebrand man. He leads the efforts of the rebranding experts, which he founded in 2017, after 30 years of business and brand strategy experience for P& G, McDonald's, Anheuser Busch and others.

Rebranding Experts was purposely designed to be the only agency with the comprehensive services necessary to rebrand organizations. It starts from the fundamentally different viewpoint that traditional branding firms that see rebranding as a marketing strategy. His team believes rebranding should be a strategic growth accelerator, creating a forward facing organization ready to grasp new opportunities. It's a jet pack to your success. Jim, welcome to the show.

[00:02:31] Jim Heinigner: Hi, Lori. It's great to be with you.

[00:02:33] Lori Highby: I'm super excited to have you here. I know we met about six months ago, as you kindly reminded me, and we had a great conversation then. So I'm excited to bring it to the listeners today.

[00:02:44] Jim Heinigner: Terrific. Good to be on.

[00:02:46] Lori Highby: Yeah, so a lot of different brand changes seem to get lumped together as rebranding. How do you differentiate between a logo change or a refreshing of a brand or a completely different overhaul of a brand?

[00:03:01] Jim Heinigner: So great question, and it is a challenge in the rebranding business. Anytime a company, a product or a person or an issue needs to change, people say it's calling for a rebranding, but it's a little more narrow than that. A little bit more focused on an existing brand that needs to go through kind of a brand led business transformation. So we look at it and like kind of three different levels. If a company is just needing to kind of update and refresh its look, well, that's, that's a logo change. That's, you know, new colors, maybe that's used as part of its its palette and some tagline copy. That's a brand refresh. Oftentimes then you see companies that need to reposition, meaning they need to introduce themselves to perhaps a new customer segment or a new geographic area or new products, new services. And that's a repositioning of the brand.

A great example of that that we've seen and been watching for several years is what Victoria's Secret is doing. Going from that over the top, you know, imagery of angels and too much underwear and so forth to trying to be a little bit more commonplace and a little bit more representative and inclusive of all women.

Whether it's going right or not, it's another question, but that's a good example of a repositioning. A rebrand is when you stand up an entirely new brand when you change the name of the company or the product where you come up with a new promise of what you are to customers. And then all that visual support as well, too, and where you're going to need to make sure that you are bringing your employees along in creating a new culture and a new experience that they can deliver to the customers so that the customer feels an entirely new brand as a result of this effort.

So we call that kind of brand led business transformation.

[00:05:00] Lori Highby: Fascinating. We just went through a refresh of our brand recently, just kind of polished up some of the colors and tweak some of the fonts and whatnot. But that in itself is a big project going to doing a complete overall. I can't imagine, you know, we've, I've only done that once for ourselves and that's definitely not our, our area of expertise, but yeah.

[00:05:22] Jim Heinigner: It takes a lot of time. You know, it can take up to a year, 18 months to do it successfully.

[00:05:27] Lori Highby: Yeah, I believe it. So what's happening in the world of rebranding right now? Any trends that you're seeing?

[00:05:34] Jim Heinigner: It's a lot of interesting trends and actually this time of year we always kind of look back to say, okay, what's happened in terms of this kind of business strategy of rebranding and what can we learn from it and how will it influence the coming year?

Clearly what I think will influence things more than anything is the challenge that Twitter had in its rebranding to X. You know, normally we the public is getting very familiar with rebranding and companies needing to do it and why, and they're pretty accepting of it. But here was a case where it seemed kinda groundless and very egotistical and it was executed in a very haphazard kind of way.

And as a result of that, it just brought on an onslaught of criticism, really kind of downgrading the value of the brand as well, too. And therefore it's not a good example for people to follow in the future. It's kind of the face plant, as we like to say. That that we can learn from but not in the right way.

But then there's a lot of other kind of interesting trends taking place. You know, one of the things we continue to see is companies or organizations changing their names or their products as a result of the negative connotations that they have. You know, we saw after the George Floyd movement things like Aunt Jemima changing its name to Pearl Milling.

Some of the things that are happening this year are the Audubon Society. Which was named after a man, John Audubon, years ago. These are, you know, nonprofit chapters around the country are starting to drop the name because it's, it's increasingly clear he was a slaveholder and he, he was, not someone that you necessarily in today's age want your organization named after. So we continue to see that kind of trend taking place. And then the really interesting one that's happened in the last couple of months is what we're calling rebranding boomerangs. And it's where a business has, you know, changed its name and rebranded in the last few years, and they're changing back to what their original name was.

So Business Insider which is the online news platform, tried to suddenly become all things to all people and a real generalist news site, and changed their name to just Insider. And they went through a little bit of a kind of a corporate change in the last month or two. They brought on a new CEO who said, we're going back to our focus on business, and we're going back to Business Insider.

We saw the, the giant PR firm, Hill and Knowlton Strategies. They had added the name Strategy several years ago when they acquired another agency that had that name. Now they've just gone back to Hill and Knowlton. So whether Strategy isn't part of their service anymore or not, question to ask them. But it's kind of this trend of, you know, going back to basics and a little bit of simplifying things back to what they were previously.

[00:08:25] Lori Highby: Sure. Yeah. So you mentioned Twitter or X. I mean, that's even part of the challenge with that brand already. No one knows how to really position it, but, what can we learn from that?

[00:08:36] Jim Heinigner: So if you are contemplating a rebrand, if you think it's a business strategy that you want to employ in the future, you know, you need to really evaluate what are your current brand assets? What's the value of your brand among your users and take into account such things as the familiarity with your brand name among users or customers and non customers, the nomenclature that you've kind of created around your brand, like in their case, tweets and retweets and so forth and don't throw it all away. You know, there's value in all that. And you really need to do some deep research to understand how embedded are these assets that we have, and are they worth changing, you know, away from. It's estimated that Twitter lost potentially four to 20 billion in market value as a result of that rebranding.

And that's not good news. So it's not about the founder of your company. It's not about the leadership and what their views are. It's about your customers and always keep the focus on your customers. You make sure that whatever you're transitioning to has more meaning than what your current brand name does, going from Twitter, which was loaded with all sorts of hard earned value to X, to a letter, just didn't make sense. Mhm. It was important to Elon Musk, but not to the rest of us.

[00:10:03] Lori Highby: Yeah.

[00:10:03] Jim Heinigner: And then really put together a thoughtful strategy on how you're going to roll this out. Don't just surprise people and over the weekend say, oh, by the way, we're changing our name, but have all your internal audiences prepared behind the rebrand and ready to tell the new story. Make sure that your partners on the outside are aware that you're making a change and why the rebrand is necessary before you ever tell them what the new name is. Don't just surprise them with it.

And then really make sure that you have a plan for engaging people in that brand and accepting your change for months to come. And not just leaving people hanging out there, ready to complain about it or create even, you know fan groups that are dissing it after the fact. That's just going to erode everything that you're trying to do with a rebrand.

[00:10:57] Lori Highby: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Those are, those are great tips to, in a very public brand that definitely did not tackle this the right way. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. So Jim, we're going to switch it up a little bit more fun, less branding related questions. But if you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of, less of or differently with regards to your professional career?

[00:11:20] Jim Heinigner: So I, I would probably say two things. You know, don't ever hold back. Don't come up with reasons not to do things, come up with reasons to do things. And if it's anything that is going to advance your skill building or learning new experiences or putting yourself out there more, find the reasons to do it and pursue it.

Don't be cautious. Don't be passive, Jim, as you're building your career. And the second thing I would say is, regretfully, we all run into people in our careers who are not folks that we want to associate with. You know, are wanting to either capitalize on what you've built and earned, or they're trying to just focus on themselves and building their egos and so forth.

So learn to smell a rat when you, you know, and know, know when you want to politely bow out or step away from an engagement, a discussion, a relationship with people that are going to be huge time sucks and who are really out to pull your life force away from you as opposed to help you in the future too.

[00:12:25] Lori Highby: Yeah. I agree with all of that. It's really paying attention to where you're spending your time and energy. I think that's really important for sure. Yeah, great tip for sure. So I'm going to give you the opportunity to interview me, Jim. What's something you'd like to ask me?

[00:12:40] Jim Heinigner: Oh, the very same question. 20 year old self.

[00:12:43] Lori Highby: Oh boy. Yeah, that's, that's fun. You know, I would have been more intentional about spending time with like the professors that I had in school and really building some relationships and rapport with them, because you know, back then there wasn't like LinkedIn or a way to just easily stay connected with some folks, even individuals I went to school with at the time.

So I think it would have been really good to build some mentoring relationships and had some someone that to kind of guide my professional trajectory a little bit more than me just going willy nilly down whatever path I ended up choosing. But having someone, a sounding board to talk to, I didn't really kind of make those types of relationships and I kind of wish I did. And I would have probably spent more time reading and really intentionally paying attention to what was happening in school as opposed to just doing what it needed to get done to pass the class. So.

[00:13:38] Jim Heinigner: Yeah, you know, I guess one thing I've learned over the years too, is that we are surrounded by good examples and bad examples of what to do and how to behave and how to make decisions and so forth.

And we oftentimes lean into this, you know, this mentor and thinking one individual is going to help us achieve a lot. Oftentimes it's a combination of traits from a lot of different people that you kind of weave together into your little, you know, personal mentor, so to speak, you know and taking the best from all those people, but then being really keen to seeing bad examples and to say, boy, you'll never catch me doing that in my career. And, and really committing yourself to that and policing yourself to make sure that you don't make decisions when under pressure or duress. You know, to follow in bad footsteps.

[00:14:27] Lori Highby: Yeah, yeah, most definitely sound advice for sure. Any final words of wisdom that you'd like to leave our listeners.

[00:14:34] Jim Heinigner: Get involved, you know, I think you know, I met you Lori at a conference, where we were networking, after the day session. Going to conferences, exerting yourself to make sure that you meet people. I like to get involved in organizations of other professionals.

It's a good way to sharpen your own skills, but also develop contacts and relationships that might benefit you in the future. I'm super involved in the American Marketing Association. And our Chicago chapter here and really try to make sure that I'm giving a lot so that I get a lot back from that too.

[00:15:05] Lori Highby: Oh, I love that. Definitely a big fan of getting involved. Not just joining, but participating and volunteering and supporting in any way that you can. That's great advice for sure. Jim, if anyone was interested in getting in contact with you, what's the best way that they can reach you?

[00:15:21] Jim Heinigner: So our website is rebrandingexperts. com. I'm at jim at rebrandingexperts. com and on social look under rebranding experts and you'll find us there.

[00:15:33] Lori Highby: Fantastic. We will include all that information in our show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today, Jim.

[00:15:40] Jim Heinigner: Great to be with you, Lori.

[00:15:41] Lori Highby: Absolutely. All right. This wraps up our episode of Social Capital.

A huge thank you to Jim for taking the time to connect with us. If you have a burning marketing or relationship question, reach out. I'd love to answer it on this show. And as mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to hearing from you and I hope you enjoyed today's show. Go out there and get noticed.