The Importance of Your Brand.

​Rebrands are hard to get right…. but if you crack it, then the rewards are bountiful indeed.

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Think Anderson Consulting to Accenture – I bet they have not looked back.

And here are a few that got it wrong:

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Back in 2010, the High Street favourite spent millions on a rebrand of its iconic logo. This produced thousands of critical comments including a protesting Twitter account – and after just one week, it was forced to about turn and issued this statement:

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“We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.”

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Again millions spent on this, modern makeover… lots of comments were along the lines of “Dull and a bit too Google like” … perhaps not the success this tech giant was hoping for!

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This was Pepsi’s new logo – not much of a change hey? The circle was placed on a slant rather than Earth’s magnetic force… people complained the new logo looked like a rotund man in red top and blue jeans! Surely this iconic brand could have done better.

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And can you believe it was 2001 when the Royal Mail rebranded as a new company “Consignia”? People didn’t know what it meant - it was fussy, too long, and a real shambles. A little over a year later, they rebranded as Royal Mail once again!

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And so to our bountiful journey…

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For those that read my blog back in May, I wrote about how we were bringing five established brands together. With over 22 years of heritage, PFJ Recruitment, RPCushing, The Graduate Recruitment Company, Aspire Global Network Asia and Periscope were joining together as one new brand: Aspire.

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Well what a fabulous six months it has been! We may not be Microsoft or Gap or had millions to spend, but we hope to have got it right.

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We re-launched under one unified brand of Aspire – bringing five websites into one. We ran a rebranding messaging campaign, multiple digital campaigns, produced brochures, blogs and videos, and communicated internally and externally with stakeholders as to what we were doing and why – no small task!

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Oh, and we redecorated our London offices, tweaked the fabulous look in Singapore and have just moved into new premises in Hong Kong. It sure has been busy!

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We needed to retain our customers, both past and present, by making sure we remained relevant to them and kept the elements of our business that made us valuable to them.

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So we decided to style our website for all our stakeholders, including the following:

• For active job seekers, we have over 600 live roles at any one time, all fully searchable

• We’ve created “homepages” for all our specialist areas and added a degree of personalisation, so you should see content and jobs that are relevant to you.

• For passive candidates, we have plenty of blogs, information, insights into the industry and hopefully some insight into Aspire as a company.

• For our clients, we provide reassurance of our heritage and expertise

• For our employees and potential employees, we have the ability to share across social platforms the insights of others, the trends, the jobs and of course life at Aspire.

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Some of the early results

• Candidate applications are up 60%

• In a recent survey, 87% of all respondents thought our website was good or very good!

• 94% of people would recommend the site to fellow jobseekers

• When asked to describe our site, these are the words that people used…

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The site has also been shortlisted for a few awards, so we’ve got our fingers crossed…

Most importantly our clients, candidates and the people that make Aspire what it is, love the new brand and find it a far simpler proposition. But we won’t be resting on our laurels, so watch this space for further changes to come!