Before you start a rebrand, look at your corporate strategy and customer alignment first

Multiple brands, bundled solutions, corporate strategy, and rebrands can create chaos on so many levels. And where is the customer in all of this? Robin Tooms asks Chris Levy, Global Marketing Director at Quest Integrity Group.

Robin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest again, is Chris Levy, Global Marketing Director at Quest Integrity. So Chris, I’m so glad that you’ve come back on Brandonomics.

Chris: Thank you for having me again.

Robin: Yes, and I’m so glad that you’re going to share more about the story of the rebrand process that you went through at Quest Integrity, and, you know, I know that this is a very large company; it’s not just the brand itself, but you have a lot of integrity management products within the brand portfolio as well, and that must have factored into the rebrand conversations too, and I’m sure you can share with us a little bit of how you guys looked at that challenge, and how to, kind of, wrestle with that issue around brand hierarchy.

Chris: Definitely. I think it was really the genesis of our decision to jump into this.

Robin: Oh, it started it (Chris: Really.). Ok.

Chris: So to back up just a little bit, I would say that whenever you’re looking at your brand and considering where you should go and if you should change, that you really need to start back with looking at your complete portfolio of brands, and sub brands, products, services, sometimes bundled solutions that you’ve branded in the marketplace, and also align that with the corporate strategy, the business strategy and the vision of the organization, to ensure that the things that you’re doing in those brands are aligned with that vision. For Quest Integrity, as we step back and looked at the portfolio, we realized, I think, as well as a lot of B2B organizations as they grow up, we had developed a brand for multitude of technologies, tools, and services. So, for us, we really felt like as a growing company, that the brand was really fragmented, and so we really weren’t developing or building equity in Quest Integrity or any of the products and services. We were really diluting the brand.

Robin: So what, for you, was the customer impact of that brand dilution? Like, what did this mean for the company then?

Chris: I think what it really meant for the company was having to step back and make that decision as to what type of brand strategy we wanted to have and that has to be through the lens of the customer’s viewpoint, you know? And so, we step back and said, what do, what does a customer of ours, what do we want that customer to remember, or think about when they think of Quest Integrity? And when you’re looking at a particular, you know, perhaps, one client may use twelve different solutions that you offer, what is it that you’re asking them to recall or remember in the marketplace? Is it all twelve solutions, or is it, you know, the master brand? And so, for us, it came down to determining, do we want to have a house of brands, or do we want to move to a monolithic brand?

And in the end, we decided that a monolithic brand was really the correct strategy for us, because ultimately, Quest Integrity should receive the value and the recognition for the services and solutions that we offer, because we want our customers to think about Quest Integrity as the brand that delivers that combined solution set. It’s not one particular tool, or one engineering assessment solution, it’s really that combined solution. That’s Quest Integrity.

Robin: I am so glad you shared that, because I think that thought process is something that every company should go through. So, thank you again.

Chris: Thank you.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.