You're ready to brand your company, or maybe you're about to take the jump to re-brand your corporate image to better reflect your current vision, mission and positioning. But, right before the launch, you realize that all the decisions during the design and strategy process have been based on personal taste, "likes" and "dislikes" and the opinion of your wife/husband or neighbor instead of informed decisions made by experienced counsel, backed up by strong theory and research.
Much has been written about the definition of a brand, brand strategies and how to create a great brand. Pest control marketing has it's own little quirks, however, one constant seems to be that when creating or re-creating a brand, all decisions should be made on empirical insights and research. This approach allows us to understand that a brand can be a catalyst for positive changes and can fulfill broader business goals besides providing a company with a simple logo. When rebranding AIPM, the kulture Konnect team started the process with three simple questions:
The answers to these questions allowed us to identify their positioning statement, which, ultimately, helped us define their market needs and wants and create employee engagement to ensure they understood and endorsed the brand values through their attitudes and behaviors.
Animal & Insect Pest Management comes from the history of APM. They specialize in urban wildlife and pest control. When they approach Kulture Konnect, their brand was two decades old and was not speaking to their internal staff or their actual target market. Their audience's needs and wants had changed several times during those two decades, but their positioning statement and brand stayed stagnant.
Through quantitative and qualitative findings we were able to identify specific insights that helped us understand the current and potential state of AIPM's brand. Quantitates tools such as surveys and interviews allowed us to identify decision processes, words and other vocabulary used by their target market as well as levels of engagement. Qualitative tools such as familiarity (awareness vs. experience) and favorability (perceived quality vs. likelihood to recommend) measures led our team to recognize several issues with AIPM's current brand at the time and how to face the change of a new brand that speaks to all constituencies.
Kulture Konnect developed and implemented a full rebranding campaign that included logo design, slogan, positioning statement, corporate identity, website redesign, email marketing and social media. A full brand strategy that created a new and more approachable image for AIPM and that open a few other channels of engagement for their audience.
Brand management is a new concept for many organizations. If you are committed to your brand - and we hope you are - it is crucial that your executives and general staff understand its importance. Many business owners and executives have emotional attachments to the brand that they have known for the past 20 years and are not ready or willing to accept the change. Overcoming these attachments is easier if your brand is born from a common, researched idea that is used to make all other decisions.
The AIPM team, executives and staff, had an attitude and behavior commitment to the change path they were taking, which projects a positive image internally and externally so everyone can embrace the new brand. Changes require constant monitoring and communication between internal and external channels, which means that, in order to have long-term success, the new brand should be linked to the business' outcomes, internal and external education of all constituencies and informed decision-making.
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