MBA1939 The Cost of Updating Our Branding & Logo

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Hey, welcome to the Hundred Dollars RMBA show where you get better at business building every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn the cost of updating our branding and logo. You thought about updating your branding, changing your logo, giving your business a refresh? Well this episode's all about how much does that all cost in terms of money effort. I'm sharing everything we went through with our own branding refresh over at our software company Webinar Ninja. This is our first branding refresh in six years. We did do an initial logo change after we got out of beta, but this one's a big one. I'll walk you through how we made the decision that it's time for a refresh, how we went about refreshing the brand, the logo, the colors, all that kind of stuff, all the work that's involved in doing that, updating all your assets like your website and your social media and all the other stuff, but also timing this refresh with a launch which would make this refresh make a little bit more sense for our Customers. This was a fun project but a lot of work. So I want to lay it out for you so you know exactly what to expect. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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About six months ago, we decided it's about time for us to refresh our branding. We took a look at our current logo at the time and thought, you know, this logo, the fonts and the logo, we love it and all, but it doesn't really reflect the brand. The business we've evolved and become over the years, we've become easy, light, simple to use and our current logo at the time was just not reflecting those values. Speaking of values, we want to reflect what our customers say about our product, say about our brand, say about our community. They say things like supportive, simple, modern, fun. So we wanted to incorporate all of that in our new branding. We knew that later in the year we were going to have sort of a big launch with our new plans and new free plan and introduce some really amazing functionality and UI improvements inside of our app. So we thought this would be a great time to launch the logo and the whole new rebranding for our website and on our product itself. So we sat down with our company head of design, we have an in the house designer and we thought, hey, we like the logo but we want to improve it, we want to refresh it, we're going to modernize it. Let's workshop this and take a look at some alternative options of what a 2021 version of our brand with our values with who become as a software would look like. And we would go back and forth with beatings and a few iterations and finally we narrowed it down to two different kind of branded logos and we couldn't really decide which one we liked better. So we actually put it to the team. Our whole company voted on which version of the logo they liked. We took it a step further and we actually presented the two versions of the logo to our custom in a members webinar and they voted. And it's no surprise the results of the vote were exactly identical in terms of what version of the logo won. Now, alongside the logo we decided to also update our color palette to go along with the vision we had for the company as well as the current values and what People say about our company, we wanted to make sure the colors reflected those things. So even though we have less colors in our new color palette, they're more aligned with our brand and where we're going. And when I say where we're going, well, a lot of what you're doing today can help augment your brand in the future. So if you're coming out with new products or features or new services, and those will have its own kind of brand, you want to make sure your colors for your entire company brand will go along with those types of products. But we took it a step further and we created a whole branding guide. So we had our color palette, we had our new logos in both light and dark versions, but also we created a branding guide, meaning anytime somebody's going to use our brand in any way, whether it's us, the team, with social media or ads or blog posts or anything like that, or somebody external, like somebody who's going to be writing an article about us or going to feature me on a podcast episode or something like that, and wants to use our branding, we would give them this branding guide to follow. And the branding guide actually includes things that we do and don't do with our branding. What kind of images represent our company and our customers. We're big on diversity, so we got make sure that all our marketing materials represent that value. We even have a standard format or formats for our images and what they look like when we share it on things like Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn. This keeps things uniformed and makes your brand stand out because it's consistent. So doing all of this branding work just to really bring the brand together and solidify the final version of the new branding took about six weeks. But. But that was the easy part. Okay. The hard part was actually applying this branding to everything we already had, like our product, like our software, like every page on our website, like our blog, like our social media channels, like external sites, like review sites, or even reaching out to our partners and affiliates who have written blog posts about us and saying, hey, we've updated our branding. Here's our new logo and new colors, and go at it. And please update your blog posts. And even though we updated our logo for over two weeks now, I'm still finding places that we forgot. So this is going to happen because you've been using that old logo for years for all these different kinds of pages and different materials, and sometimes you're going to miss a few things. But we did make a huge list, basically a checklist, and assigned Each task to different team members to update different areas of the brand. This task of updating our branding everywhere took some time. Took about four weeks to kind of prepare for when we launched. And after launch there were some things we had to change as well. Now there are some hidden costs to changing your branding and your logo. Any kind of materials, print materials that you have created in the past, are kind of obsolete now. We're talking about stickers, we're talking about T shirts, swag, letterheads, things like that that have your old logo kind of over wasted now. I mean, I have a big box, we open our ninja T shirts and bags and swag that we take around when we go to conferences. And really those T shirts I can't really use anymore because it has our old branding and we don't want to confuse people with old branding versus new branding. So we'll probably donate those items to a local charity. But some companies hold on to them actually, and they sell them on a swag store, for example, has retro T shirts. But obviously some time has to pass in order for that to actually make sense because if you just start selling it, even though you just launched a new logo, it looks kind of weird.

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To wrap up today's lesson, was it worth it? Yes, it was totally worth it. To refresh our brand, it was time we needed to do it. The thing about your business is that over time, it becomes something else. It's kind of like a baby becoming a teenager. It develops different characteristics, different types of attributes. It becomes something else than it used to be. So you can't dress your teenager. It just doesn't look right. A rebranding is also a great excuse to market, to celebrate and to announce it to the world. To get people to head on over to your website and check it out. But it is quite costly because all that time I just mentioned that we contributed to doing this to refresh our brand and to change all our marketing and branding. That's a lot of time spent and time is money. These are hours that your team members could be doing something else to improve your business. This is why I don't recommend doing this every year right. But when you do it, make sure you do it right. Spend the time to do it right. Dedicate the time. Make sure you are making the right choices. Get the opinions of your team members. Get the opinions of your customers like we did. You don't need to make this decision alone. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA Show. Make sure you hit subscribe. Follow whatever it says on your favorite podcast app to make sure you get your next episode right here automatically. Tomorrow's episode is Q and A Wednesday, where we answer the question, how do I approach partnerships without any evidence of previous success? If you're trying to partner with somebody, if you're trying to build a network of affiliates, or even building a marketplace for your business, how do you secure these deals if you don't have a track record? We talk about that in tomorrow's episode. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Saying goodbye to your old logo and branding is kind of like saying goodbye to an old T shirt you loved wearing when you were younger. It's kind of bittersweet and it's surprisingly emotional. I mean, it should be. It's your business, your brand. You've been working on it for years. But just like that old T shirt, you know it's time. It's time to make a change. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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