Event
Online Sharing Session on Brand Transformation Experience
【Writing/Iris Hsu｜COMMEET Editorial Group, article reprinted from COMMEET, please click here for the original article】.
Branding is not only about having a beautiful external vision, but also about developing a series of strategies based on the brand's genes, and disseminating the same core values from the inside out. In addition to letting external people see the brand's vision clearly, it's even more important for internal people to recognize these values and move towards the same future goals, so let a professional branding consultant tell you how to deconstruct your brand, and let COMMEET tell you what's really going on with brand reinvention. COMMEET will tell you what brand re-branding is all about with its hot experience in brand transformation!
Why do start-ups need to rebrand?
In the past, I have heard that restructuring and rebranding are all done by companies with a long history, but Tripresso CTS (the predecessor of COMMEET) was less than a year old when the decision was made to rebrand, so why did COMMEET have a plan to restructure its brand at the beginning?
Starting point of COMMEET rebranding
COMMEET's parent company, Tripresso Travel Café, started as an online group travel comparison website. Based on years of operation, Tripresso Travel Café found that Taiwan's travel model is very inefficient, and such a traditional mode of operation has been maintained for 1 to 20 years, so Tripresso Travel Café started to plan a new service, Tripresso CTS, in 2019, which is mainly intended to provide The main purpose is to provide international travel services for corporations, and by 2020, Tripresso will have accumulated about 30 clients from listed companies.
However, in the course of promotion and communication with customers, we found that many customers thought Tripresso CTS was a service affiliated with e-commerce for group tours, but in fact, from the products and services to the values we wanted to convey, it was very different from the original 2C brand Travel Café, which is why we wanted to carry out a rebranding from the very beginning. We look forward to taking the opportunity of this brand transformation to regain the consensus of our internal colleagues and adjust our future steps.
Rebranding Context Sharing
According to the experience of Probrand's past clients, there are four types of rebranding needs: the first one is the transformation of OEM brands that want to develop their own brands; the second one is the need for mature brands to rebrand due to changes in time and space, and in the past, Probrand has received the demand for rebranding from centuries-old enterprises; the third one is the need for large enterprises to develop new businesses that need to build a new brand from the ground up; and the fourth one is the most different from the previous three types of brands. The fourth type is the most different case from the previous three: brands that started from digital or e-commerce, due to the rapid changes in the environment, need to build a new brand after discovering new business gaps, and COMMEET is one of them. COMMEET is one of them. Therefore, no matter it is a small, medium or large enterprise, or even a start-up, all of them will come across the opportunity to do brand building or rebranding.
Understanding the Rebranding Process and What to Look For
Branding is not an easy task, especially re-branding. Let's share the process of re-branding through real cases, and how to judge whether a company should do brand transformation or not? What should a company pay attention to in the process of evaluating and executing brand transformation?
Helping brand owners clarify the overall concept of their brand through brand trees
We can think of a brand as an apple tree, the top fruit of the tree is the "touch points", such as websites, people and product packaging, etc., which will slowly accumulate into the customer's overall impression of the brand, but it is not easy to grow a tree, if the brand itself is not clear about what to convey, it is like a branch, the trunk of the tree does not grow steadily enough, and so the leaves and fruits on the top can not be grown. fruits. Or if the content is not clear and consistent, the message that the outside world receives will have a different appearance, and the fruit that the outside world sees may not necessarily be an apple, but may become a peach, an orange, and so on.
In order to have consistent content, you need to know who you are, what are your brand's values and positioning? Who are the competitors? How is the external environment and so on, before planting a tree seed to clearly understand what they are, suitable for planting in what place, the planting environment should also be enough to understand, in order to know the apple tree to absorb the nutrients.
As for how to evaluate re-branding, Probranding believes there are a few opportune moments that show the importance of re-branding for a business:
1. The external environment has changed dramatically.
It can also be divided into threats and opportunities. Threats may be the loss of target customers, or competitors have a major innovation; opportunities may be new demand gaps in the market, such as the extension of new services from existing services, like COMMEET, from travel services to expand the expense management system, then we have to consider whether it is more appropriate to split into two brands to operate.
2. New progress in internal operations
For example, in order to go public, restructure the organization, and gain more investors' attention, the brand image has to be reorganized to make the internal and external appearances consistent.
3. Mergers and acquisitions
When two companies merge, they will need a new brand name or vision, which is a good time for re-branding. The last one is very common in Taiwan - the second generation of a company needs to do a rebranding, in addition to developing a new business model or letting the internal people re-understand the vision of the company, through rebranding the company to make it sustainable.
5 Steps to Branding
Usually, brand building is divided into 5 steps, from the front-end brand analysis to strategy development, and finally to produce a complete brand concept. After the brand concept comes out, the brand can follow the logic of the previous brand tree, and based on the front-end analysis of the customer journey touchpoints, the brand analysis will be implemented to the various touchpoints, and lastly, because the brand is continuous, it is necessary to always go to the supervision, good management responsibility.
COMMEET Brand Rebranding Process Sharing
(Images and comments selected by COMMEET team members in groups)
The greatest significance of re-branding for COMMEEET is that through this process, we hope to unite our internal colleagues to share the same idea of the brand. Pro assisted us in organizing many workshops, during which all colleagues were able to express their own ideas, which helped to help our internal colleagues to gradually clarify and recognize the concept of the brand.
This re-branding is divided into two stages, the first stage focuses on the brainstorming of colleagues within the company, the COMMEET team did a lot of homework, from the analysis of competitors to the final process of extracting the brand name, each discussion is like a war, just the brand naming proposal there are 116 options, and finally there is the birth of the "COMMEET". (Extended reading: COMMEET Rebranding and CIS Corporate Identity Design Reinvention Case Sharing)
The COMMEET brand name has two meanings, the first is the commitment to our customers, and the second is the original intention of COMMEET to provide travel services from the very beginning, hoping that people would emphasize the concept of "come and meet". After reaching a consensus among our internal colleagues, we began to expand outward in the second phase, communicating COMMEET's values and concepts to people outside the company. Through Pro's lead, Jerry Hung, the CEO of COMMEET, had the opportunity to talk with senior executives of Oi Pump.
This proposal gave Jerry Hong Ming-feng, CEO of COMMEET, a different perspective. Mr. Chang Teng-xi, CFO of Dai-i Pump, believes that the greatest value of COMMEET lies in the service of advances: "Not having to make advances makes employees feel the warmth of the company, and creates a sense of identification with the company, so that they will voluntarily put in more effort. This story deeply affected Jerry and brought him great inspiration. Before that, Jerry thought that the value of COMMEET is to enable enterprises to save more time and cost, and to provide enterprises with more efficient management methods, and advances are just one of the methods.
Until now, we have always been inspired by the symmetry of our proposals with our customers, and these are the driving forces that help to make COMMEET even better.
Insights into the effectiveness of branding for start-ups
(COMMEET brand assisted graphics)
Many people will think that do brand is a costly thing, no way to immediately see the results, in know why do brand and do brand process, and finally come to look at do brand re-creation of the results and insights.
What are the changes before and after the transformation of COMMEET brand?
The effectiveness of re-branding can be divided into two parts: qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative results are very obvious, such as logos and business cards will have very different results after re-branding, and the internal staff's feelings towards the brand will definitely change.
The quantitative part is related to the company's operational aspects or figures, and we can also go back to the 5 steps of brand building. In the strategy stage, there is a mention of vision, which can be regarded as a direction to pursue, and it should be implemented into the various departments of the company to become an evaluatable KPI indicator, and the whole company needs to be clear about and agree with the vision in order to make it possible to realize.
The KPIs of brand management can also be divided into several categories, such as brand awareness, preference, or whether brand equity has increased, etc. Some data can only be obtained at a cost, such as through the assistance of market research firms to see whether brand awareness has increased, but of course there are also some results that can be seen without spending any money, such as whether or not the channels have become more extensive, and so on.
In assisting COMMEET's re-branding project, Pro has also won another honor. Pro has won the Brain Magazine's Branding Design Work Award for four consecutive years, and this year, the design results of COMMEET's re-branding project were submitted for the award, and it has successfully won the Brain Magazine's Top 10 Design Work Award. (Extended reading: COMMEET Rebranding Wins 2021 Brain Magazine Top 10 Design Works Award)
Lastly, Jules Lee, General Manager of Pro Brand, suggests to business owners that they should not do branding just because they want to do it, but should know what kind of future they want to take the brand to after they have determined the brand vision and the company has enough energy, and then set KPIs that can be evaluated, so that each department will have the motivation to move forward towards the goal.
COMMEET CEO shares the value of branding and current achievements from an operator's point of view.
This rebranding experience not only helped COMMEET to find a long-term vision, but for Jerry Hung, CEO of COMMEET, branding is a long-term commitment to customers and providing them with solutions to problems that have been bothering them for a long time.
As we moved from travel e-commerce to cloud-based SaaS services, we were always thinking about how we could provide better services to help businesses and individuals through travel technology, and we finally chose the travel market. From the launch of our travel service in 2019, we had good results until early 2020 when the travel market came to a standstill due to the impact of the epidemic. However, we believe that travel is one of the must-have businesses in corporate operations, and the fastest way to resume travel behavior after the opening of borders in the future will definitely be travel, so we have continued to stick to this path.
Until 2020, we still could not see the recovery of the international travel industry, so we began to change the direction of the company's development, switching to provide domestic travel services, according to the domestic travel application scene, the first problem that needs to be solved is the transportation cost reimbursement, so we integrated functions such as taxi, high speed rail, fuel subsidies, etc., and then gradually and gradually expand the process can now cover the entire company's expense reimbursement process.
We hope to provide a cloud-based financial tool that can solve the problem of company advances and payments, and the company will become relatively easy to manage.
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” - Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos
COMMEET CEO Ming-Feng Hung Jerry has been communicating internally with his colleagues that we are doing a meaningful and visionary business, and that helping our employees maximize their value is helping our company achieve success, and that personal growth and company success should go hand in hand.
“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.” - Howard Schultz
This seminar will bring you to understand that branding is not as good as having a bright and shiny appearance, but the brand's internal genes are the key, and more importantly, branding is not only the operator's homework, but also a vision that the whole company can recognize, and only when everyone understands this vision, the brand will be able to continue to operate in a sustainable manner. Regardless of the business model and the size of the company, branding is a difficult problem that operators must encounter, and I believe that after this sharing session on the practical battle of brand transformation, everyone's awareness of branding will reach a new level.
About the Speaker:
- Process Pro Brand Honorary Advisor Mr. Lee Kwok Wing Jules
Jules Lee, Honorary Advisor of Process Pro Brand Taiwan, has served Singapore International Bookstore, New Zealand Tourism Board and Australian Tourism Board Office in Taiwan, and worked as an industry reporter and marketing public relations consultant. Her rich experience in brand strategy construction and marketing communication has refined her keen insight into the market, and created her communication and management power in brand management.
- Tripresso / COMMEET CEO Founder Ming-Feng Hung Jerry
COMMEET Founder and CEO Ming-Feng Hung Jerry, originally a listed company, founded Tripresso Travel Café, Taiwan's largest travel and entertainment comparison platform, specializing in data integration, and now develops Taiwan's first travel and expense system, COMMEET, vertically integrating tourism solutions from B2C to B2B, and developing service applications horizontally, in the hope that through digital transformation tools, we can help our customers achieve success more efficiently. We look forward to assisting our customers to achieve success more efficiently through digital transformation tools.