It’s an emotional situation. You just invested time, energy, and money in a rebrand, and something’s off. Maybe your new rebrand…

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- Doesn’t fit your daily needs
- Makes you look the same, not different
- Doesn’t feel like you

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I wrote about how and why those things happen in a previous post: https://lnkd.in/gbuKPPdV

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‍So what do you do? I recommend creating space for a blame free retrospective with your team, with three ideal outcomes in mind:

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🤔 Gain insight into where your team fell out of alignment with your design partner.

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This will help you understand if your unhappiness stems from a strategic misstep.

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Some questions to guide the conversation:

- When did stakeholders on your team start to feel disengaged from the work?

- When did it stop feeling energizing?- Were there developments in the strategy that stakeholders disagreed with? -

- Were the disagreements voiced? If not, why not? If so, how did your design partner respond?

- Did you feel pressured to approve things you didn’t fully believe in? What was the source of the pressure: a deadline, a stakeholder, your SOW?

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🧩 Identify which aspects of the new brand aren’t resonating.

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This will help you understand if the unhappiness stems from a specific aspect of the design. Some questions to guide the conversation:

- Which aspects of the brand followed the stage where you fell out of alignment with your design partner? Are they resonating or not?

- Are aspects of the brand difficult to implement into your product? Marketing materials? Sales tools?

- When the brand was revealed, which aspects did people react most strongly against? Strongly in favor of? What did they say specifically, what words did people use?

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⚖️ Assess whether you have the internal resources to resolve these issues, or you need additional support.

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This will help you understand how to start moving forward. Some questions to guide the conversation:

- How complex are the issues we’d like to address? Would you describe the issues as strategic or executional?

- Is the potential benefit of making these changes worth the potential cost? Or can we, knowing the cost, begin to accept the brand as it is?

- What is our design capacity currently? Where would this work rank against existing priorities?With these insights, you should have what you need to take a next step, whether it be to brief a design partner, ramp up internal team members, or wait until time and resources make a revision feel more possible.

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If you need support guiding this discussion with your team, or find yourself in need of a design partner to get your brand to a place your team really loves, let us know ☀️