Rebranding services for B2B businesses

A refresh evolves the brand. A rebrand redefines it. A refresh says we’re still us, but better. A rebrand says we’re becoming something different. The test is whether you’re changing how the brand looks or what it means. If the positioning still holds and it’s the execution that’s tired, you want a refresh, and we’ll tell you if that’s the case before you spend rebrand money.

Anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. The four stages run in order, so the timeline depends mostly on how quickly decisions get made, not on how long the design takes. Cerdic Capital was a new name, a new identity and a launch in eight weeks, in a sector with no tolerance for gimmicks. Groups with several divisions and more people to satisfy take longer, because the agreeing takes longer than the designing.

It’s quoted per rebrand, because the range is genuinely wide. A rebrand that’s mostly identity work costs less than one where the positioning has to be settled first, and a group with several divisions or sub-brands costs more than a single brand. Some businesses need the thinking and keep the identity they’ve already got. We’ll say if that’s you, and quote for that instead of the full thing.

Not if it’s done properly. Working out what’s worth keeping is part of the audit, before anyone designs anything. Usually something carries real equity, whether that’s a colour, a name, a shape or a phrase customers already use about you, and it gets carried across on purpose. What gets dropped is the stuff that’s just old rather than established.

Often not. The four stages are audit, strategy, messaging, then identity, and they run in that order for a reason. Plenty of businesses already know their positioning and only need the messaging and identity. Others need the thinking and keep the logo, building a set of assets around it instead. We’d rather sell you the right part than the whole thing, and the audit is what tells us which.

It’s protected deliberately, not hoped for. Every URL gets mapped and permanently redirected, pages that have earned impressions keep their URLs, and we don’t bundle a domain change with a content overhaul, because doing both at once is what causes the damage people associate with rebrands. Expect some movement for a few weeks. Expect it to settle. A clean, fully mapped move behaves very differently from a rushed one.

It isn’t a switch you throw. We sequence it so the commercially important things change first, which is normally the website, the sales deck and whatever’s going out to customers this quarter. Everything else changes as it comes up for renewal. Your team keeps working the whole time, and you get the files and guidelines as they’re finished rather than all at the end.

It depends whether your buyers are buying the group or the divisions. Where each division has its own market and its own reputation, keeping distinct voices under one umbrella usually works better than flattening them. bis henderson went to three divisions with their own voice inside one system. Where the group is what people are buying, the opposite is true. That decision is what the strategy workshop is for, with both sides in the room, because the hard part is agreeing rather than knowing.