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Jim Heininger talks with Jason Barnard about mastering the three R’s of brand evolution.
Jim Heininger, Founder and Principal of Rebranding Experts, discusses the differences between brand Refresh, Repositioning, and complete Rebranding. Jim also explains the two primary reasons for rebranding: 1. the necessity, due to mergers or crises, and opportunity, and 2. to pursue new strategic growth paths.
Jim Heininger and Jason Barnard explore the challenges in rebranding, such as legal trademark issues. Jim also talks about the significance of the role of the CEO in driving the rebranding process and strategies for retaining the brand’s integrity.
Learn how successful companies navigate these transformations, from quick visual updates to comprehensive identity changes. Jim concludes the episode with insights into how short brand names can streamline branding strategy in a digital world.
What you’ll learn from Jim Heininger
- 00:00 Jim Heininger and Jason Barnard
- 03:10 What Did Jason Barnard Highlight in Jim Heininger’s Knowledge Panel?
- 03:34 What Did Jason Barnard Focus On in Jim Heininger’s Google Learn About Results?
- 04:23 What Are the Two Reasons Why a Company Would Need to Rebrand?
- 06:06 What Makes Rebranding More Pragmatic or Imaginative in Both Cases?
- 07:15 How Long Does Rebranding Usually Take?
- 07:46 What Are the Factors That Influence How Long a Rebranding Process Takes?
- 08:07 What Challenges Do Organizations Face When Changing Their Name?
- 08:20 What Factors Determine Whether a New Brand Name Will be Approved?
- 09:09 How Did Meta Manage to Launch its Rebrand so Quickly Despite its Common Name?
- 09:29 Why Did Facebook Rebrand to Meta?
- 10:04 How Did Rebranding to Meta Help the Company Expand Into the Virtual Reality Space?
- 10:55 What Did Jason Barnard Emphasize About How Fast Facebook Was Able to Rebrand to Meta?
- 12:16 What Challenge Do Companies Face When They Name Themselves After Their Product?
- 12:58 How Can Companies Handle the Challenges of Rebranding When Their Name is the Same as Their Product?
- 13:42 Why Did Jason Barnard Ask if a Business Was ‘A Lot’ or ‘A Little’ Devalued if There’s an Exit?
- 15:23 How Can Professionals Change Their Company Name to Separate it From Their Personal Identity?
- 16:35 What is the Ideal Timeframe for a Successful Rebrand?
- 18:58 Why Will the Short Brand Name Trend Be Short-Lived Rather Than Long-Lasting?
- 19:00 When Will Companies Move Beyond the Trend of Ultra-Short Brand Names?
- 19:02 Why Do Brands Prioritize Simplicity When Evolving Their Names?
- 19:44 Why is Simplifying a Brand Name Considered a Refresh Rather Than a Full Rebrand?
- 20:05 Why Do Brands Choose Unique Names Over Descriptive Ones Despite the Marketing Challenge?
- 20:21 Why Do Some New Businesses Start With Descriptive Names Before Building Recognition?
- 21:05 What Key Responsibilities Must CEOs Own During the Rebranding Process?
- 21:42 What Key Decisions Must CEOs Champion During Strategic Brand Transformation?
- 22:05 Why Must CEOs Personally Embody the New Brand Vision?
- 22:38 Why Does Late-Stage CEO Approval Doom Rebranding Efforts?
This episode was recorded live on video February 11th 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
Website: https://www.rebrandingexperts.com/
Twitter: @RebrandExperts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rebrandingexperts/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebrandingexperts/
Jim Heininger
Transcript from Jim Heininger with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. The Three R’s of Brand Evolution
[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy, a legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:00:36] Jason Barnard: Hello everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Jim Heininger.
[00:00:45] Jim Heininger: Nice. Thank you.
[00:00:47] Jason Barnard: Did I get the name right?
[00:00:48] Jim Heininger: I will not sing back, just so you know.
[00:00:51] Jason Barnard: Well, the nice thing about singing is you have more time to get the name right. And I get it right more often than I get it wrong.
[00:00:58] Jim Heininger: It worked.
[00:00:59] Jason Barnard: Today we’re going to be talking about Rebranding, and one thing that really interested me was the fact you differentiated between rebranding, refresh, repositioning. Were those the three or there are more?
[00:01:11] Jim Heininger: The three main buckets. And the term Rebranding is used very broadly. And so I think it’s important to kind of break it down and understand what people are actually referring to. So we look at the base level as kind of a brand Refresh. That’s the visual makeover. Perhaps a new logo, color palette, maybe some new messaging or a tagline, but it’s really kind of a visual makeover, a new coat of paint on a brand to give it some new energy, give it some new life, make it more modern, relevant. The second stage would be Repositioning, where you’re truly going after a new marketplace. You’re trying to offer new products or services, and you’re needing to pivot the brand to be able to appeal to that new customer or that.
That desired customer. We see companies like what Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie and Fitch was another one. Even the retail space a while ago did that, trying to kind of shed some old brand positioning to be able to, to be more successful and reach more customers. At the end of the day. A rebranding in our eyes, is the whole. The whole package. So it’s when you do the refresh and you do the repositioning, you also change the name of the company. You introduce a new brand name, new mission, vision, values.
You change the culture of the organization to be able to deliver that new brand promise to customers in a way that you couldn’t before.
[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: So kind of a new company?
[00:02:48] Jim Heininger: Resetting the company. It’s a great opportunity, rarely comes along, so take advantage of it.
[00:02:54] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Well, what we focus on at Kalicube is the name change because that’s where we can help. We find the digital footprint, we find every mention of the brand and we can help with our algorithms with Kalicube Pro to change that name. And before we get into the meat and potatoes of this, we focus on brand names, including people’s brand names. And your brand name has this delightful Knowledge Panel with Google’s AI at the top. Looks pretty good. It’s pulling the description from your company website. I would suggest it would be better if it pulled it from your personal website since you are not your company and vice versa.
But that’s a really nice Knowledge Panel. But then I looked into Google Learn About. If you’ve looked at that, they’ve knocked it out of the park. And this is a learning experience. This is ChatGPT on steroids with search results. Busted chat LLM engine plus knowledge. So the three technologies we need to focus on and you can see here, it immediately understands that you’re a specialist in rebranding. It understands who you are.
It can give me follow up questions on the left about rebranding and it’s bringing me down your funnel. So your personal brand, as soon as I search for you, is going to bring me down your funnel. Your specialist topic when it’s well designed. And Fabrice Canel from Bing explained to me that’s what they’re doing with CoPilot, that’s where we’re going, is these machines are going to recreate the funnel for brands and for personal brands. And that’s hugely exciting.
[00:04:19] Jim Heininger: Yeah, good, good.
[00:04:21] Jason Barnard: Groovy. Right.
Okay. So why should a company rebrand?
[00:04:25] Jim Heininger: Well, we look at it as kind of two reasons, two buckets of why. There’s a need. So you have to make a brand change for some reason that could be a merger or an acquisition. Sometimes it’s a leadership change where they’re wanting to reflect their, you know, their new vision for the organization or you face a crisis and you’re wanting to leave baggage behind by changing the name, the understanding of who you are. And that’s where actually most rebranding take place because of mergers and acquisitions, where you have your forced into making a decision of which brand you go with or do you create a new brand. The other exciting bucket is opportunity. And that’s when a company is wanting to pursue a new strategic growth path. They’re realizing that their existing brand is just not. It’s an anchor, it’s not allowing them to grow in the way that they want or they need or it brings associations with it that don’t reflect that new strategic growth pattern.
And they want to create opportunity with their brand to be able to go out and do more business in the desired, you know, arenas. So. And there’s a lot of crossover between the two, definitely. But it really helps you realize that sometimes you’re forced into doing it and other times you, you do it for strategic reasons. And that’s where the most exciting activity takes place.
[00:05:52] Jason Barnard: Right. When it’s an opportunity, it’s a lot of fun and when it’s a necessity, it’s kind of functional, boring. Both need to be done. But in both cases, is it more pragmatic or imaginative? What’s involved?
[00:06:06] Jim Heininger: Well, I think, you know, and what we will always say is look at it as an opportunity. So, if you’re merging two organizations together, as an example, don’t just say, it’s automatically gotta be this. Stop and say, here’s a point in time where we could create a new brand that using the combined capabilities and products and services of these two organizations coming together, we could create something entirely new that allows us to grow into companion industries, into other areas that you never would have imagined because your identity was so locked in that previously conceived kind of channel. So you’re not going to want to rebrand a lot of times in your business life, but always make sure when those decisions need to be made, that you are thinking creatively is, and opportunistically is how can we be really forward facing at this point in time.
[00:07:03] Jason Barnard: Right, and that’s a great point. You don’t do a rebrand very often and when you do, it’s a huge undertaking. It takes a lot of time. So my two questions are how long? How much does it cost?
[00:07:15] Jim Heininger: So, so we are seeing on average and that the time is shrinking because of impatience with business leaders, is wanting to get this done quicker. You know, it used to be about 18 months from beginning to end or beginning to launch to do a rebranding and people are really compressing that now because they want the more immediate results. They just, we don’t have the patience that we used to, you know, when it comes to running businesses and so forth. So we’re finding a lack between nine and 12 months now. One of the biggest factors though, at least in the US is trademarking. So if you are creating a new name and you go through that full process of name selection, you then have to submit a trademark for that with the US Patent Trademark Office. It can take a year to be reviewed and approved. So what’s happening is that organizations that are going to change their name, that don’t want to wait a year to hear that it’s been approved, we’re having to go through a much more rigorous kind of name evaluation process and legal perspective to be able to say this name, you know, that we, we’ve conceived has, has 100% chance of being approved because there’s nothing close to it, there’s nothing that, that where we would be infringing on anyone else’s trademark.
And so that’s why you see so many kind of unusual names that are being created these days. And you know, where they’re dropping vowels or they’re coining new names and terms, it’s to get around the trademark issue, to shorten that rebranding runway.
[00:08:54] Jason Barnard: Right. And then something like Meta, which is a very common name. And from a branding perspective, that’s both an advantage and a problem. They spent a lot of time preparing it, didn’t let anybody know, and launched it on the world very quickly. How did they do that?
[00:09:09] Jim Heininger: You know, Meta’s actually, and it got a lot of negative feedback at the time that it happened. But the corporate strategy there was very smart. So, you know, Facebook and Instagram, they certainly Facebook had a lot of baggage associated with it and was under a lot of scrutiny and so forth. They wanted to, you know, just as I was saying before, seize the opportunity to be able to grow into this new virtual reality space that they, that they were creating and realized that the Facebook name itself could not do that, that they needed to create a new parent company name that opened the door for them to be able to go after that new business venture and to coin their own term of the Meta universe, and the Metaverse is something they owned as they launched the, into that, that particular business space. So by leaving Facebook behind and the baggage behind, creating that new corporate rebrand name, they were able to open the space up for them to be able to go, you know, go forward with a lot less clutter in their path. Now, have they been successful in that Metaverse world is up for debate in terms of what people think as to what the promise was. But strategically, what they did was brilliant. They did, they kept it under wraps, you know, and, and it wasn’t, wasn’t well known.
There was a little hinting to it, but, but they launched it then in a very day, one kind of robust manner. Everything changed. Of course, they’re, they’re all digital properties. So it’s easy to change those on a single day. But be able to create that consistent experience for customers of what the new brand was, which is critically important.
[00:10:55] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, what they managed to do, obviously, changing your own properties is easy. Changing properties of other people, Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, that takes a huge amount of effort and preparation. You need to know where these mentions are. You need to go in and change the name. And they did it in an afternoon. I hate to think how many people were working on it, because I was tracking it with Kalicube Pro.
[00:11:18] Jim Heininger: Yeah.
[00:11:19] Jason Barnard: And we saw it was a pivot. Sorry, excuse me.
[00:11:22] Jim Heininger: How much money it cost them too? Yeah.
[00:11:24] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, we’ve done a brand pivot for the podcast in two days, and it’s worked and it’s been reflected in Google in two days. I think that’s huge. They did it in an afternoon, and Google was reflecting it straight away. Talking of Google, when Google chose the name Alphabet, that was creating a company above the other companies, which Meta weren’t doing. They were just rebranding.
[00:11:44] Jim Heininger: Yeah. So, I mean, in both those cases, it was a where they didn’t change their existing name. They created a new corporate structure that carried that new name.
[00:11:53] Jason Barnard: Oh, Meta created a new corporate structure. I didn’t realize.
[00:11:56] Jim Heininger: Well, and I think they renamed the corporate. The corporate brand name so that Facebook was a product within that portfolio. Yeah.
[00:12:05] Jason Barnard: Which makes a lot of sense. I mean, people were saying Google, but it’s actually Google Search and then YouTube and then all the other products that got Gmail. And so that freed them from the individual products. And I think a lot of companies have that, is you launch a product, you call yourself the same thing as your product, then you realize you’re stuck.
[00:12:23] Jim Heininger: Yep, yep. And you now you need some room above to be able to create new brands, new services, you know, to achieve your growth goals.
[00:12:33] Jason Barnard: It’s a great place to be in to say, well, I’ve outgrown my initial product. But I think a lot of. There are two kind of things with rebranding in this particular context is companies that create a product like Facebook become so big, they then need to rebrand, create a different corporate structure. And then individuals who create a company call themselves their company, the same thing as themselves. And that’s a huge challenge. How do you deal with that?
[00:12:58] Jim Heininger: So we find that a lot in the professional services world, where it’s, you know, you know, a doctor, a lawyer, you know, attorney or anything in the professional that the kind of financial world. You put your name on it because you think that’s going to attract people from a business perspective, the integrity of your name and so forth. And it does work for a long period of time. But then you find business changes. You’ve got now a hundred people. It’s not all about you. Or you have an exit strategy that the minute you leave all of a sudden that name doesn’t mean as much potentially and you’re leaving behind a business that’s a little bit devalued. That, so we’re seeing a lot of this.
[00:13:43] Jason Barnard: You said a little bit devalued. Isn’t it a lot devalued?
[00:13:46] Jim Heininger: Depending upon the situation, you know, so, so, you know, can you keep that founder spirit alive and present in your brand even though they’re no longer part of the organization? Some people do it well, a lot of people don’t. So we’re seeing like in the, in the United States a lot of dental practices. So dentists, always used to be my doctor, my Dr. Rougosen is what, where I went from my anything in terms of oral health. They’re now being consolidated and they’re businesses now that are running it and they’re now branding these things like Magnificent Smiles as a way of talking about the outcome of using their services as opposed to an individual. So, so it, depending upon what your exit strategy is or your, you know, how long you can maintain an individual’s name really starts to. There comes some decision points that you need to decide what you’re going to do.
[00:14:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah, and I’m with the, of my name is my company name. I find people struggle to disassociate themselves from their company and they see themselves as the same thing. And it’s very difficult to explain actually. It’s two different things.
[00:15:01] Jim Heininger: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:02] Jason Barnard: And so then saying to them, you need to change the name of the company because you’re not the same thing as company. And when they do it, it becomes very clear. And for a professional, what’s the process there? Because there’s an emotional attachment, a personal branding value and a pragmatic process they need to go through to actually change the name.
[00:15:23] Jim Heininger: Yeah. And where we often find it really starts to click with them is when you, when you bring up that discussion of exit strategies, what, what is your, your exit strategy or your long term strategy in terms of ownership of the company? If they have family members that are going to be taking it over, you know, there’s some value keeping that original last name as part of it. If they are planning on cashing out and want to leave the business, then change, you know, kind of evolve to a new name now so that when you go to market it, you’re not, that buyer isn’t faced with that decision. And, and, and you know, it’s, it’s impacting what they think the investment in the, you know, in the buy is. But more they, they’ve got a brand name that they’re buying now that’s established and they want to continue. So that tends to get people thinking is when it’s, when you bring it to the. What’s your exit strategy?
[00:16:16] Jason Barnard: Well, I was talking to a guy called Matt Raad who flips businesses on the podcast and he gave me the figure of 18 months that you’ve given me as well. But now you’re saying people want to shorten, that they want to do it faster. 9 to 12 months. Is it 9 to 12 months or are we still pragmatically looking at an incompressible 18?
[00:16:36] Jim Heininger: The biggest factor in it, beyond the trademarking, is what kind of public facing brand assets do you have that need to be updated? Because when you’re making the change, you want to have in place the mechanisms to update any signage on buildings, if you have trucks or a fleet that need new signage on them, you know, any kind of vehicles and you know, if you think of an airline, you know, you have to change the names on the planes, you have to change the names on the gates and that takes a long time to do. So you got to pull that plane out of commission so that you can repaint it. So those things, you know, you’re finding that implementation piece of it can be extremely lengthy and you have to, you have to decide when are we going to, when are we going to go and announce this new brand and say over the next 12 months we’re going to be changing all our branded assets that the public normally sees to our new name. Because you want, you don’t want to create confusion in the customer’s mind. You don’t want to have them seeing two different brand names and questioning, okay, now is this. Is that the same company or did they get bought or you know, what happened here? Because it’s not their priority to understand what your brand is, it’s yours. So, you know, you want to eliminate as much of that potential confusion and doubt by really implementing a very quick turnover of all those assets.
[00:18:07] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah.
And when your audience asks themselves any kind of question, you’ve hit some kind of friction there. And my perspective, I mean, you talk about changing the names on the planes and in the airports and on trucks. I don’t even think about that because my world is digital. Well, it’s digital and then people and Google and if you don’t change it very quickly like Meta did in an afternoon, the machine gets confused and the machine will throw back a very confused message to the user and that’s even worse. So making that digital change is incredibly important. You need to do it very, very fast. I’m going to completely change the topic. You talked about short names and there’s a fashion for short names.
Do you think that will be short lived or long lived?
[00:18:59] Jim Heininger: I think it’ll be short. It’ll continue for a long time. People are not wanting multiple names that they have to bungle through. They just want to call something by one name, one word. And, and so you continually see even companies that had two names, even like Dunkin Donuts, you know, was several years ago where they dropped the donuts partially because they were expanding beyond doughnuts, to all sorts of other food options. But Dunkin was just much cooler and simpler and so forth. So we see on a daily basis in our monitoring of rebranding companies that they’re calling it a rebrand. It’s really not.
It’s just a shortening of their name and, you know, and updating their visual image. But they’re dropping descriptive language that no longer makes sense, no longer applicable.
[00:19:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah, and that descriptive language is something that traditionally we kind of think, well, it helps the consumer understand what it is we do. But actually, and this is the thing I did with Kalicube is say I’m going to create a unique name because then I can give it meaning. Is there huge value in that? Because it’s a huge battle to actually create that meaning.
[00:20:11] Jim Heininger: Well, and when you start out, it is helpful to give, you know, some descriptive language, you know, whether it’s in the name or in the, you know, the tagline or something to help people initially understand who you are and what space you occupy. It is often helpful as you’re successful in business. You earn the opportunity to start to shed some of that if it’s no longer supporting you.
[00:20:36] Jason Barnard: Right. Brilliant. So in fact I should have called my company Rebranding for Entrepreneurs and then changed the name recently to Kalicube as we started to take off.
[00:20:46] Jim Heininger: What’s your tagline? Make it your tagline.
[00:20:48] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you so much. Well, it’s actually digital brand engineering is our tagline. Hopefully that makes sense to people. Last question, that is my role as a CEO. What’s my role in rebranding?
[00:21:02] Jim Heininger: So most of the organizations we work with, we hear from the CEO initially who says, I think I got an issue here, I got a problem when trying to solve, and it’s related to my brand. What are my options, what’s involved, how much does it cost, how long is, you know, how long does it take and all those kinds of things. Because they want to be the one that introduces it to their leadership, as this might be a path that we need to take for our future success. Also, that person needs to carry the rebranding flag through the entire process. So there are key decisions that need to be made. You know, name positioning, promise to your customer. The CEO needs to be the one supporting those decisions the most and reinforcing it among their leadership is the commitment to what those new things are.
And then as you go to launch it to your employees, you know, they need to be the one that’s embodying it and really reinforcing it and living it every day so that people have a model to be able to follow of what does this mean to our organization. Customers need to hear why you made this decision, why it’s important for them, you know, relevant to them, why it’s important for the business and their ability to continue to serve you. The CEO is usually the best person to do that. So we want the CEO engaged. We want him to be part of the process. We don’t want to be taking this whole rebranding concept to the CEO and saying, we need your approval on it. That setting us up for failure. To be quite honest, that suggests that they haven’t been engaged enough to know what the decisions are that are going to need to be made and being a part of them.
So they front and center as far as we’re concerned.
[00:22:48] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. That’s a great way to end the episode. The CEO is front and center, needs to be engaged and actually needs to drive the entire process. Thank you so much, Jim that was delightful. Thank you everyone for watching you get the outro song, a quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Jim.
[00:23:04] Jim Heininger: Good to be with you.
[00:23:06] Jason Barnard: Brilliant.
[00:23:06] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.
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