Rejuvenating a brand is needed to revive a brand, or simply to revamp a brand that is naturally going through a stage of decline.

Are your products not selling as well as they use to, or as well as you would hope?

· Perhaps your customers have found a replacement for your brand elsewhere? 

· Perhaps your brand promise is no longer relevant? 

· Perhaps you product has simply become obsolete following a new technology?

· Perhaps the need for which your brand was initially designed for, no longer exists?

· Competitors are slowly eroding your market share

Age, taste, social trends, new competitors, all represent factors that can result in a change in buying behaviour, which often translate into your customers no longer requiring your products

Does your entire company need a brand rejuvenation, or perhaps you simply need to make your offering more appealing to your customers with a minor repackaging design?

Three levels of Rejuvenation:

A holistic re-branding of a company, from top down: refurbishing logos, trademarks and revamping the entire corporate    brand image.

· It may only involve updating some of the brand’s products to reflect changes in demand.

· Rejuvenating a brand may simply require repackaging a product to give it a fresher, more contemporary look to appeal to new generations of consumers.

Beside the three level of rejuvenation mentioned above, your company needs to make its brand appealing and give consumer reasons to buy your products.

Below are three possible approaches

Make Your Brand ‘Trendy’

Making your brand trendy will make your brand appealing to a brand new audience. Apple for instance is perceived as a cool and young brand. Facebook and Beats headphones are also trendy brands that people buy because of their ‘cool’ factor. A young and trendy brand is a sure way to expand your business. You will probably have to carry out extensive market research to find out what makes those young people tick.

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

Always make sure that you know who your competitors are and what these companies are doing at all times, this will allow you to tailor your selling proposition and win over some of their clients. To track what the competition is doing you can set up Google Alert for each competitor; this will notify you as soon as a competitor publishes anything about them. By having a clear picture of your competitors you are in a strong position to counter attack.

Brand Repositioning and USPs

Reposition your brand by reinforcing your USPs (unique Selling Propositions), developing new uses for your products and targeting new segments of the population.

Communicate to your new and existing customers what makes your products really unique i.e. give them reason to buy your products.

The Harley Davidson case

Harley Davidson suffered a significant decline in sales in the early Seventies, only to be revived in recent years. The advent of smaller Japanese motorbikes started creating a dent in the brand’s sales. Harley Davidson responded to this threat by introducing smaller motorbikes, but these were perceived by its customer to be of poor quality, so sales continued to slump. The company was in the brink of collapse, when it decided to heavily invest in quality and in a distinctive style. As we all know Harley Davidson is once again a revered brand with millions of loyal customers worldwide.

Samsung…from a producer of commodity items to a cutting-edge technology company

Another example of a successful corporate rejuvenation strategy is Samsung. In the mid 1990’s, Samsung decided to no longer produce commodity electronics products sold by retailers worldwide, including Walmart, but to heavily invest on research and development in order to create innovative, cutting-edge technology products. By focusing on product innovation and brand-design strategy, Samsung experienced a dramatic rise in sales and brand value in just a few years.

Today Samsung is the biggest smartphone maker in the world and the heavy investments on marketing its brand is definitely paying dividends. According to Interbrand, a reputable benchmark measure of brand value, Samsung now ranks in seventh place globally, with its brand value estimated to be $45 billion.

In conclusion rejuvenating your brand requires efforts and resources.

Whether you are considering a full holistic rebranding or simply looking to redesign and reposition your products, you will have to carry out some form of qualitative research with your customers, current and former ones.

To get you started, here’s an example of questions you should be asking your customers:

· What they think about your brand and if they feel something should be changed.