WORK WITH SONDO, THE REBRANDING AGENCY WHO GROWS YOUR BUSINESS
Branding for mergers and acquisitions
A merger or acquisition is an exciting opportunity for growth but also brings the potential for instability. Developing the right brand is key to navigating doubts and rallying everyone behind a bold, new vision for the future.
REBRANDING AGENCY MELBOURNE AND GOLD COAST
Stakeholder management
More questions swirl around your business during a merger or acquisition than at any other time in its life. There’s uncertainty from staff, customers and often legacy founders too. The good news? You can use the branding process to unite your stakeholders into one passionate team – building their new organisation together.
Getting there requires nuanced diplomatic skills as much as killer creative ones. We’ll help you make your stakeholders feel essential parts of the process, learning essential insights from them along the way.
Brand architecture
Adding new operations to your business brings added complexity to your story. We’ll advise you on the best brand architecture – the rules and hierarchy for how you present the various parts of your organisation – to keep your proposition to customers clear and simple.
Brand story
Customers have developed associations with the legacy businesses that existed before the merger or acquisition. You’ll want to make the most of the positive associations, while distancing yourself from any negative ones. But you must do so in a way that makes customers let go of old attachments and replace them with an emotional investment in your new business. That requires a compelling new brand story. We’ll help you articulate what makes you special – and better than pre-merger – so your new entity feels the obvious right choice for the future.
We have so much more clarity about our target audience and how we are currently perceived in the marketplace — and how this needs to shift. We also have the confidence to charge more for our services and start initiating conversations about different services.
Our services
We offer a full suite of services to refresh your brand, launch it, and keep it purring for years to come.
Too often, projects fail because no one stopped to identify the core problem. At Sondo, the foundation of everything we do exists upon an effective brand strategy. This way, our creative projects aren’t just beautiful – they actually make a difference.
Sondo is a branding agency known for its insightful brand and marketing strategy. We’ll dig deep to understand your organisation and industry, identify the core challenge standing between you and your goals, and recommend the most effective levers to solve it.
To discover more about how we can help you with brand development and strategy, click here.
Brand design and visual identity are what most people think of when they hear the word “brand”. And with good reason. Your visual identity is only one element of your brand, but it’s where most customers’ experience of your brand starts. As a creative branding agency, our brand design will ensure that first impression wows them.
Words are the quiet achievers of branding. Your business’s voice has a great effect on how the world perceives you – and it’s one of the most cost effective ways to influence customers. We’re a creative branding agency who has developed standout verbal identities for market leaders. We’ll craft the perfect tone of voice for your business, and create key messages to ensure you’re telling a compelling, consistent story every time you snatch a customer’s attention.
Been to a great looking restaurant that was let down by crappy service? Culture is the most overlooked pillar of branding. The way every team member from CEO to intern acts profoundly affects how customers and staff perceive your business.
Sondo can help you create the foundations for a strong, positive culture that actively reinforces your brand identity at every moment of every day.
To stay current with customer (and staff) needs and expectations, your organisation may need to refresh its brand from time to time. A rebrand or refresh can be an essential tool to achieve new business goals, but it needs to be managed right to bring your stakeholders with you.
At Sondo, we’re passionate about creating new brands. It’s an exciting opportunity to pitch your dream, think big, and explore all the possibilities for your new business.. But the tricky question is: which of those possibilities are right? Don’t worry, we’ve got you. We’ll steer your business past the common traps and dead-ends to craft a brand that’s unique, authentic and effective.
Driven by strategy.
Exploring with empathy.
Delivering real results.
A guide to a successful rebrand
What does rebranding actually involve?
Having a brand that resonates with your customers and stakeholders is essential for any successful business. However, shifting to a new look and feel is much easier said than done. Rebranding is complex, and requires careful planning, research, strategy and execution.
As an experienced branding agency, the team at Sondo has spent years helping businesses pivot in a better direction. Below we provide an overview of the steps involved in the rebranding process:
- Define your rebranding objectives, scope, budget and timeline.
- Conduct a brand audit to assess your existing brand identity, and your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
- Conduct market research to understand your target market, your competitors and industry trends.
- Identify the specific core challenge/goal the brand needs to help your business achieve, and define a brand strategy to do that.
- Design a new brand proposition that will achieve the strategy and clarify what your brand stands for. Your refreshed proposition may include your mission, vision, values, positioning, personality, and messaging.
- Update your brand image and identity. This may include a new logo, colour palette, typography and style of imagery or photograph.
- Document brand guidelines, to ensure future collaborators use your refreshed brand correctly and consistently.
- Implement your new brand with a rollout across all touchpoints, such as your website, social media, marketing materials, packaging, signage, and more.
- Communicate your new brand to your internal and external stakeholders, such as your employees, customers, partners, and media.
- Monitor and measure the impact of your rebranding on your brand awareness, reputation, loyalty and performance.
- If required, develop ongoing marketing strategy and digital strategy to bring the brand to life in your daily communications.
I just need to update my logo. Why are strategy and the other brand elements important?
Occasionally clients come to us just wanting to update their logo. But as we talk about their business challenges and goals, they soon agree they need to consider their brand as a whole in order to set themselves up for future success.
The reason for this is that your brand is more than your logo. It’s the story of the difference your business makes to customers’ lives. That story is told through every single part of your business that a customer experiences: your logo, sure, but also your colours, fonts, the style of language you use, and the way your team behaves to customers and each other.
The world’s leading businesses have successful brands that connect with their target audience because every element of their brand identity has been carefully
designed to tell a consistent story. A story their brand agency has deliberately shaped to grow their market share, open entirely new markets, or achieve other specific goals of that business.
So bottom line - it’s very rare you can achieve significant improvements by creating or changing only your logo. In fact, if you update your logo without considering how it interacts with the rest of your brand, your brand elements might create ideas that clash with each other and backfire into a confusing customer experience that undermines trust.
Sondo is a rebrand agency with the experience, creativity and smarts you need to review all the elements of your brand at the same time, so they work together like a finely tuned machine, telling the story that’s best for your business.
Why should I employ a rebranding specialist like Sondo?
If you’re overhauling your branding, you're going to want to do it right. And if you’re going to do it right, you’re going to have to be thorough. As we mention above, rebranding projects require an extensive audit of your existing design, brand values, culture, story and communication. That’s a lot of stuff to stay across. You probably want someone who’s been there before. That’s where Sondo can help.
We’ve worked on countless rebrand projects across various industries in Australia, empowering businesses to celebrate their strengths and capitalise on new branding opportunities. Our team are your closest collaborators, helping you to navigate the twists and turns of the brand design process and make the most of your rebrand. We understand how to distil all the elements of your story into a consistent, impactful and authentic brand, helping you make the most of what your organisation does best.
Curious about our portfolio? Click here to see our previous work.
