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Thank you Alicia,
On RE-BRANDING:
There are several reasons one might wish to do this – but they should all be considered carefully because they are almost, but not quite, starting from scratch.
Some possible reasons include:
- to distance oneself from previous works
- to distance oneself from old relationships (e.g., professional ones like former agents&publishers)
- because your brand isn’t gaining enough awareness
- because your brand my have bee coopted by someone with more media presense (e.g., your name happens to be the same as the character in a new movie – and everyone is confused)
You should not re-brand without considering all of the factors involved.
Some reasons why you shouldn’t rebrand include:
- some media circus around something unaffiliated with your brand is causing you temporary trouble (e.g., when the mega-band Anthrax was attacked 20 years after releasing their first album by people upset because of the anthrax-laced postal scare)
- you’ve already re-branded at least once already
- you don’t actually know what your brand currently is
SHOULD YOU RE-BRAND?:
Answer the following questions:
- Are you ready to commit to the new brand fully? (And not just ‘testing’ it out?)
- Is your current brand dead or toxic?
- Do you have a core following that will adopt the new brand easily?
- Do you already know what your brand is and know why it isn’t working for you? (You need a Brand before you can Re-Brand. If you don’t have one yet, skip this and learn how to Grand first.)
- Are you sure that you don’t just need to shore your brand up or wait out a tough period?
- Are you sure you aren’t giving into a whim or a trend?
- Are you sure you don’t want to just ADD to your existing brand (e.g., Every time Stephen King uses a psuedonym, it was released to the public announcing that it was actually Stephen King using another name. He never ‘rebranded’. He added a new segment to his brand by applying a new name. Eventually, those novels were republished under Stephen King, because the public accepted the ‘new’ product as part of his brand.)
- Have you listed out all of the positives and negatives of re-branding? Are the positives significant? Are the negatives insignificant?
If you treated those questions as homework, did the homework, and answered YES to all of them – then you can choose to re-brand.
If any of these are no or even a maybe, just work on your current brand.
HOW TO REBRAND:
(strong caution: really really don’t do this if you don’t have to)
Follow every single step of creating a brand. Really. It’s the same thing.
That means to define in detail what that brand is supposed to be and who it’s for. Develop products for it, present it, and manage it – all as if it’s brand new.
Be careful when overlapping with your old brand. Why? Because overlapped audiences will resist the new brand for lots oof reasons. Even if they support you – they will still brag to others about how “they knew you when you were still ABC” instead of “XYZ”. My wife changed both her first name (to her middle name) and (when we married) took my last name. There are still people out there using her original first name. They claim it’s out of habit – but since they only knew her for 2 years and it’s been 20 years since changing it – it is not a habit. It’s their ego demanding they reinforce that their relationship with her goes back that far – which honestly pushes her away. It took the introduction of Facebook to get some old friends to accept my new name (reinforcement is key) – even though my own mother called me Lazarus since High School. Audience refusing a re-brand undermines it on many levels. If you are forced to rebrand to the same audience, make sure the audience will accept it or be willing to lose them and weather the backlash.
The most important part of re-branding, though, is RE-ENFORCEMENT! You have to push louder and harder than with your original brand. You have to be more well-defined and embody this new brand in a way that no one can ignore.
Echo changed her art when she changed her name.
I changed changed how I dressed and acted when I changed my name.We weren’t just a new name on an old favorite.
Because a brand is NOT a name. A brand is the experience you give your audience. If you don’t change that, then you haven’t changed your brand at all.
As authors, you will produce new works with new themes/styles/messages, etc. You will change how you interact with your fans – whatever that means to you (e.g., more reclusive, more extraverted, more humorous, less tolerant of trolls, etc.). You will work hard at doing those things. You won’t just slap on an old name and be the same old thing.
This is why it’s not recommended to re-brand. It is so difficult to do.
Major corporations get away with it for a couple of reasons. First, they can fire the boss and change their corporate culture faster and more easily than a human being can do that for themselves (because they literally change the mix of people involved). Second, their audience rarely cares enough. Did anyone really care when Datsun turned into Nissan? No. Or when British Petroleum turned into Beyond Petroleum? No. Did anyone care when Coke became New Coke? There were riots.
Which brings me back to this point:
- Do you have a core following that will adopt the new brand easily?
If you misjudge this – you will lose both your re-brand, and your ability to re-brand in the future. Because your brand is not your message – but your audience’s interpretation, only they get to decide what the brand actually is. If they tell you you can’t change it once – they will double-down telling you you can’t change it a second or third time.
That’s all I can think of now.