Rebranding or repositioning your agency

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

And I’m Gini Dietrich.

And today we’re going to rebrand this podcast. We’re changing the name to something else entirely. Not true. No, no, we’re not. You know, one day I’m going to get these opens correct, and I’m going to know what we’re actually doing.

But I think we are talking about rebranding of some kind. We are. That is true. So listen to our little jingle, and then we’ll come back right after that. That is a jingle.

I’m worried with these openings that people are going to think I’m really as dumb as it seems. Trust me. That is not what they’re thinking. Well, okay. Wow. So it’s something even meaner then. Got it.

Gini Dietrich: So I don’t think it’s that they think you’re stupid. A little strange maybe, but not stupid.

Chip Griffin: Well, I’m, I’m certainly strange and I, I own up to that.

So it is what it is. I love you. Yeah. Okay. All right. Now I want to know what you want. So in any case, so we are talking about rebranding repositioning and that sort of thing, but we’re not talking about it for this podcast because we’re pretty happy with where things are, whether or not the listeners are or not.

So, Wow. That that’s great. Communications one on one right there. We don’t care if you’re happy. We are Well, I mean, truth be told, I mean, we’d probably do this podcast if nobody listened, or at least I would. We would, you’re right, right. So, but so, so for people who might actually want some substance, the, what we’re going to be talking about is rebranding your agency or creating a secondary brand from your agency.

Because this is something that, That certainly I’ve experienced. I know you’ve experienced it. It’s a question that I get not, irregularly from agencies that I’m talking to. And so we want to talk about what goes into the decision to create it and what you need to be thinking about if you do go down the path of either rebranding or creating a secondary brand.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think we both have experience that has not worked out so great. in rebranding and repositioning.

Chip Griffin: I, I have, you know, the thing is rebranding always sounds so much better than it usually ends up being. And so you, you convince yourself, Oh, this is a great idea. you know, and there are so many reasons that you can talk yourself into it.

And a lot of times it doesn’t work out now. Sometimes it does. So I’ve, I’ve had some good rebrands. I have, I rebranded my own agency consulting business at the end of last year. I’m, I’m hopeful that’s turning out okay, but you know, we’ll find out if I should have taken my own advice here and just, you know, stuck with the old, with the old name.

But, so, so, you know, when you’re thinking about whether you want to, to rebrand or create a secondary brand, you know, what should you be thinking about Gini?

Gini Dietrich: Well, I think there’s a couple of Issues at play here. And one is that when you go to redesign your website, everybody and their brother wants to redo your brand.

They all want to. And so I think you have to think about it from that perspective as well, which is does the brand that we have work? Is it well known in the marketplace? Do we have a niche? Do we have a specialty? Is it associated with that or not? And, and a good example of that is. We’re redoing my website right now.

The Spin Sucks website and every web firm I interviewed said, well, we’d really like to do this and this and this with the brand. And we’d like to, and I was like, we’re not changing the brand. I just need an updated website. Well, we’d really, and I’m like, no, because. Spin Sucks has a brand, it has a logo, it has, like, people know it, it’s out there in the industry.

We’re not going to just change it because the designer doesn’t like it. Okay, maybe we can update it a little bit, but we’re not going to completely change it. And I think those are the things you have to think about. From the perspective of, do your clients know it? Is it, is it a brand in the industry?

Does it have market share or are you just starting out? And then I also think you have to think about, is it rebranding or is it repositioning because in 2009 we repositioned. My agency from media relations, event marketing and crisis communications to a fully digital communications firm, and that was that wasn’t a rebrand.

It was a reposition.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think you’ve touched on something really important there at the end of that, which is you have to understand the terms and what you mean by that. And what you’re planning to do, what you’re trying to achieve with it. And so for those of you who are, you know, true brand experts out there, I know we’re sort of abusing the term brand right now, because we’re, we’re really talking more about renaming because, you know, people will explain to you that there’s a difference between a name or a logo and a brand and blah, blah, blah.

Fine. I’m using the terms in the, in the conventional way that most people would use it, for these purposes. And if you want to do the more technical analysis, feel free to do that. So, but you do need to understand what it is that you’re trying to do. Because a lot of times, Someone wants to reposition and they think that they need to rebrand or change their name because of that repositioning.

Sometimes you do, right? I mean, if you’re calling yourself, you know, the Twitter agency or something like that, and you’re no longer going to be doing social, okay, that’s probably, that’s one of those times where there’s a huge disconnect. It’s one of the reasons why I encourage folks not to be too specific in the names that they choose because it gives you less wiggle room.

You know, so if you, if you were, you know, Dietrich event management, it becomes more difficult for you to shift to digital marketing, right? And so in those, sometimes your repositioning dictates that you make a change. But repositioning is something that you should have a lot of flexibility to do. And while you shouldn’t be repositioning every other week, there’s no reason why you should be uncomfortable doing a reposition without a rebrand.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. And I think especially in the agency world, you might be adding in expertise or you might be adding in different services. I mean, the big agencies do this all the time, right? Where they bring in a, you know, back in the day, they brought on a social media arm into the agency. They didn’t go out and do a rebrand.

They just began to offer the services to the clients. So it could just be that you’re doing an extension of, of services, which is great, but that doesn’t require a rebrand or even a reposition. You know, it just requires thinking through how you’re going to communicate that to your clients so that they, they answer you for those services as well.

So I think you can kind of think about it from those perspectives. You know, what are we, what are we doing? What is the end goal? Just like you would do with your clients. And how do we achieve it?

Chip Griffin: Right, and I think ultimately rebranding renaming should be a last resort. It shouldn’t be the first thing you go to There really needs to be a strong case made for it.

Yes, because it’s it’s frankly a pain in the butt to do it Right. It’s, you know, there’s so many things that you have to change. I mean, you know, in changing from agency leadership advisors to saga, the small agency growth alliance last year, I still have little things out there. I still find that, you know, I have, I have free downloads that still have the old name and logo around.

So, I mean, it’s just all those little things that you don’t think about.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: So it’s not, it’s not fun. And so you really need to have a good reason for it. and, and A lot of times you don’t need to. I mean, one of the things you can think about is a sub brand. When, you know, a lot of the social platforms first came around, a lot of the agencies created sub brands where it was like Edelman Digital or something like that, right?

Mm Yep. Right, so you can have sub brands within your main one that, you know, that still allow you to, differentiate or market it in some special way, but you don’t have to give up all of the work that you’ve done to, you know, to build some sort of a brand image.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And you know, in my experience, I have the agency, which is Arment Dietrich, and then I have Spin Sucks, which is focused on the industry.

And we, we really, we went back and forth. Do we, is it an Arment Dietrich business? Do we, and finally we decided that because the agency is focused on client service doing the work for clients. Spin Sucks is more focused on professional development for the industry and working with our peers and our colleagues.

And so we decided to separate the two and we already had the brand because we had. The blog became the brand, which was not intentional at all, but that’s what happened. and it wasn’t seen as an agency blog. It was seen as an industry blog. And so we, a few years ago, separated the businesses out. We do a DBA and we have, they have their own bank accounts and everything.

but that, that was a multi year process. It wasn’t something we just decided one day we were going to do.

Chip Griffin: Right. And, and that’s, I mean, there are a lot of ways to do this. So, you know, I’ve, I’ve talked with some agencies where they’re anticipating creating a whole new corporate structure for the new brand.

That’s more the case when someone’s thinking about creating a secondary brand, so maybe they’ve got a line of business that they want to pull out because, you know, and I was talking with an agency owner recently who was, you know, focused primarily on one market but wanted to do some, some, you know, test projects, test works in a different vertical, and so wanted to have a separate brand to do that.

I’m. I don’t think that’s generally speaking a great idea, because it requires so much to create another business, build up that other brand, and all of the things that you need to, and even some of the, the simple basics, like your own email account, you know, and managing multiple ones. Now, if you, if you really want to build up a, You know, two brands at the same time, that gets really, really messy.

And it’s, it’s hard, it confuses people, you know, and so I’ve run multiple businesses very frequently over the last, you know, 20 some years, more often than not, it’s been a bad idea. but now at least I just resort to, I just use my personal email address for most stuff. So it all goes to the same place and I don’t care.

Right,

Gini Dietrich: right, right.

Chip Griffin: But

Gini Dietrich: I would say, yeah, even the employees, it becomes an issue too, because, because I have the two businesses. There’s a lot of animosity and jealousy between the two, which is fascinating because you wouldn’t think it, but, because they intertwine, but one’s focused on one thing and one’s focused on another and there’s, it’s, it’s very challenging,

Chip Griffin: right?

No, it’s, I mean, I, at one point I had, I had two separate businesses. They were in two different offices here in New Hampshire, but then at one point I consolidated them because it was just too much. Yeah, tired of because they were in two different cities, even in New Hampshire, you know, they were only 25 minutes apart, but I was still spending an absurd amount of time going between them.

And so for a lot of reasons, we decided to, you know, bring them all together. But that, you know, that then created tension where I mean, the office happened to be divided by a hallway. The two sides would almost not even talk to each other, which was just ridiculous. Weird. It was so, so strange and so unhelpful.

You know, so you need to think about those things, particularly because anyone listening to this is probably running a small business, and if you have two small businesses, it’s amplified even more. It is. If you’ve, you know, if you’ve got two large businesses, you know, they’re all doing their own thing, and they don’t really care anyway, and it doesn’t matter.

But, you know, if you’ve got, you know, businesses that are only, you know, 10 or 20 employees each at most, you know, you’re going to have a lot of that, that weirdness that doesn’t help anything.

Gini Dietrich: Well, and in my case, we’ve had, we have overlaps, so we have to have meetings where the two organizations meet together.

And, you know, there, because there is some overlap and it’s, it has been probably one of my biggest challenges in the last few years.

Chip Griffin: The thing is, if you’re, if you’re small and you’re thinking about creating a secondary brand, you really need to ask yourself, is that even the right thing to do? Because you’re, you only have so much time, so much brain power yourself.

And so if you’re now splitting your focus, how is that going to work out? Yep. Right, because the odds are it’s not like you’ve got a full fledged leadership team for both businesses. For both, right. Again, when they’re big, it’s different, right? So, so people say to me, well, you know, if, you know, What’s His Face can run, Stripe.

Is it Stripe? Twitter and Stripe? No. I don’t know. Which, what are the two companies that, Dorsey runs? Anyway, he runs Twitter and one of the payment companies. I can’t remember if it’s Stripe or not. Anyway. It’s

Gini Dietrich: probably Stripe.

Chip Griffin: It’s probably Stripe. If not, someone will correct me, I’m sure. And that’s fine.

So, in any case, so someone says, well, you know, he can run, you know, two huge businesses. Well, yeah, but he’s got full leadership teams. He’s not, he’s not making most of the day to day decisions in your agency or any, any brand that you’re going to spin off. You’re probably making a lot of those day to day decisions and doing a lot of that management.

And so, so now instead of a hundred percent focus on one, you’re going to do. At most 50 percent focus on each and is that really doing what it needs to do or, you know, would you be better off picking one or the other?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s, it’s a real challenge.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, go ahead.

Chip Griffin: No, I was just going to say, I mean, I, I, I think that, you know, these are not things to be entered into lightly and it’s not one of those ones where you, you know, you get a brainstorm and you say, okay, you know, this is the, I, I need to, to, you know, rebrand myself to take advantage of some trend or because I’m doing a repositioning or I need to create a secondary brand so I can push into a different market.

You really, really be hesitant about doing those things because more often than not, they don’t work out.

Gini Dietrich: So let’s talk about when you would do it. what in, in what situation? And I think in my case, because the businesses are so different, it made sense to, to separate them, although it is challenging, maybe there’s a case where I’m trying to think of an example, like you offer premium services to one industry, but wants to go in and offer.

Not premium services to a different industry. Like maybe it’s small businesses in one and enterprises in another. Do you, do you have separate brands for that or how do you manage that?

Chip Griffin: Yeah. So, I mean, that would be one of the cases where there’s at least a, a, a good argument for having multiple brands.

Now, again, I don’t think when you’re really small, that works out too well. Cause you know, you’re really splitting your, your focus. I would rather you just say, I’m going, I’m going down market and just, and you know, pick one. but you know, I, I certainly have seen it in larger organizations where that’s worked.

I mean, you know, when I ran CustomScoop, we had an off brand that we used to experiment with some really cheap, you know, almost consumer level pricing. It didn’t work out for a whole bunch of different reasons, but we, we, you know, we, we didn’t want to test that with the main brand because then it would change people’s expectations of what pricing would be.

Sure. You know, when I was at Karma, you know, Karma is focused more on the enterprise side of the, the media measurement space. So they kept the CustomScoop brand to serve more of the SME market. So it made sense. But again, we’re talking large organizations at this point. We’re not talking, you know, 5, 10, 15 people shops.

At that point, I think it’s really difficult to spread it out. But that would certainly be, if you’re, if you’re targeting two totally different price points, you know, that is certainly a key. You know, a place where you would think about it at least.

Gini Dietrich: And an interesting idea to have a sub brand to test with, that’s interesting.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, it, it, there are a lot of things that you can do to sort of test the waters and see, is this a path we want to go down? And it, it removes some of the risk. You know, that said, you know, again, you are splitting your focus. And so, you know, if it, if it succeeds, fine. If it fails, did it fail because it didn’t get enough attention or did it fail because it was a bad idea, right?

So you’re you’re diluting your data set to some degree and it makes it harder to make an informed Decision about it, but it is that is certainly one of the the the times and places where you would think about it you know, I think other times where you might think about a rebrand Or a secondary brand would be you know, if something Severely tarnished your brand name,

Gini Dietrich: right?

I mean, that’s, that’s a good point. Yep.

Chip Griffin: You know, I, I, I think of, Belle Pottinger, in the UK, you know, obviously they had, you know, I don’t think they ended up coming up with a second brand. I think they just ended up dissolving if I recall correctly, but sometimes, you know, you may just, there may just

Gini Dietrich: be

Chip Griffin: some, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In cases like that where your brand name is so tarnished that you have really no choice but to ditch it and move on. The example I gave earlier where your name is so specific that it’s, that you have to. generally in those cases, though, if it’s, if it’s that your name was too specific, I would generally rather see you just Modify the name in some fashion, which is the more common one.

So, you know, instead of Dietrich event management, maybe it’s just Dietrich. Right. You know, I mean, there’s a lot of things that you can do with that and, and it doesn’t, I mean, as, as you did, and as I’ve done plenty of times, you just file a DBA, doing business as for those of you who are not familiar, really simple form that you can generally file with a state that allows you to, you know, to change your name for those purposes, and you don’t have to go through a whole corporate restructure and all that kind of stuff.

But it, you know, that would certainly be a time where if your name was so specific that it, it, it gave a confusing message to your target client, I would want you to, to consider it there.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, it’s definitely something to think through. It’s not a hasty decision. It’s like to your point earlier, you don’t sit in a brainstorm and go, okay, we’re going to rebrand.

but there are certainly advantages, but it definitely needs to be a very strategic decision.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And just, you know, sit with it for a bit, you know, be, you know, try to, you know, be a devil’s advocate to yourself, get someone else to be devil’s advocate on it and bounce it off of people and say, Hey, I’m, I’m thinking about this.

What are the downsides? I haven’t thought about because, you know, Yeah, you know, I am a big believer that you always want to make conscious decisions where you’re aware of what any of the risks are and not focus just on the rewards. And as long as you’re aware of what the risks are, then you know, I’m comfortable with you making that decision.

But I I get concerned if you race into things too quickly, and particularly something like a rebrand, because, you know, if you’re, if you then have to undo it or shift it again soon, you know, now you’re just, you’re, you’re signaling instability to the marketplace and to your existing clients. And you don’t really want to go down that path either.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, running a business is one of the hardest things you will ever do because of all these decisions.

Chip Griffin: It is. And, and look, at the end of the day, I think people worry too much about names anyway. you know, I, I, I’ve often said to people, you know, who are sitting down trying to figure out what name they should come up with.

And, and, oh, I don’t know, that one sounds kind of silly. I’m like, well, you know, who would have sat down and said that Amazon, Google, Yahoo, any of those names? Oh, that’s, that’s a great choice. I mean, Yahoo? Seriously? No, obviously, they failed, but they made a lot of money over years too, so. You know, Google, really?

Come on, you know, they don’t, they don’t sound like serious names, you know, so if, if, if, if they can build the kinds of businesses they did, it clearly signals to you that, you know, there’s a lot less than a name than you think there is.

Gini Dietrich: The only caution I would add to that is. I have worked with some very large brands who

have trouble with agency names and won’t hire them because of it. And a great example of that is I have sucks in my name. It’s Spin Sucks. And they, and even if, even though the corporate is Arment Dietrich. For things like training and workshops and things like that. It goes through the Spin Sucks side.

They, they won’t do it. I have to go, I have to send the invoice to Arment Dietrich because they, they won’t hire Spin Sucks, which is dumb, but

Chip Griffin: that, that is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. But yes, it

Gini Dietrich: happens all the time.

Chip Griffin: Sure. These all the time. They absolutely do happen. And, and, you know, there are, you know, there are times where, you know, it may be worthwhile creating secondary brands to deal with specific concerns that, that folks have.

I mean, sometimes agencies create them either to, to deal with conflicts, Which is less an issue on a, you know, when you’re dealing with small agencies, because creating a second brand usually doesn’t actually resolve the conflict, right? ’cause usually when you create a conflict agency, you have entirely separate teams and there’s a firewall between them and all that kind of stuff.

But sometimes, you know, one, you know, your primary brand may have a certain client that, a new client, it’s not a conflict, but they just don’t like that, that you do work for that one. And so sometimes it’s beneficial to just be able to funnel it through a different name. For whatever reason,

Gini Dietrich: yep,

Chip Griffin: there, you know, clients can be silly at times,

Gini Dietrich: but

Chip Griffin: generally in those cases, I would have it as a secondary brand that I’m not really marketing, right?

So it might have, it might have the minimal presence necessary in order to, you know, satisfy procurement or whoever in that organization is making the decisions and writing the checks. But I wouldn’t go beyond that. And certainly I’ve had to do that over the years for a variety of different reasons where Okay.

You know, it is what it is, so.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, clients can be silly. That is a true statement.

Chip Griffin: Clients can be silly, but it’s not a reason to rebrand.

Gini Dietrich: No, it’s not. No,

Chip Griffin: that wasn’t really a good segue, but somehow I’m trying to bring us in for a graceful landing here, Gini.

Gini Dietrich: But why start now? It’s never graceful.

Chip Griffin: One day, one day, I’m gonna, I’m gonna nail it.

It’s gonna be a perfect ten landing.

Gini Dietrich: I can’t wait. Until then.

Chip Griffin: I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends. for listening to the Agency Leadership Podcast. You can watch or listen to every episode by visiting agencyleadershippodcast. com or subscribing on your favorite podcast player. We would also love it if you would leave a rating or review at iTunes or wherever you go to find podcasts.

Be sure to check out Gini Dietrich at Spin Sucks. com and join the Spin Sucks community at Spin Sucks. com slash Spin Sucks community. You can learn more about me, Chip Griffin, at smallagencygrowth. com, where you can also sign up for a free community membership to engage with other agency leaders. The Agency Leadership Podcast is distributed on the FIR Podcast Network, where you can find lots of other communications oriented podcasts.

Just visit www. firpodcastnetwork. com. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, and look forward to being back with you again next week.