The 8-Step Guide to a Successful Brand Launch

Great news: you’ve just been given the go-ahead to complete a new brand identity for your company (fist bump). Now it’s time to get a plan in place to launch the brand.

Seasoned brand teams will tell you that a lot of time and energy goes into launching a brand. Months of focus groups, surveys, R&D, messaging revisions, and market research have likely been performed to get you and your team to this spot. 

Over our years of experience with launching and activating brands, we’ve recognized that the most successful launches have a solid strategy in place, detailing the who/what/how and providing realistic timelines for delivery. If you plan ahead effectively, the launch can be smooth and reduce churn on the day it goes live. Alternatively, not planning ahead for everything a brand touches can bring a number of unwelcome surprises right after launch. 

These are The Label Collective’s top 8 considerations that are critical to launch a brand successfully:

1. Set concrete objectives everyone can get behind

First, your full team needs to understand why you’re pursuing this project and exactly what you aim to accomplish. Before any creative work kicks off, it’s important to have clear objectives for the brand launch. 

Setting good objectives

As the name suggests, objectives are goals that can be easily judged as successful or unsuccessful on a measurable, rather than subjective basis. For example, a poorly conceived objective might be, “Create a better brand color palette.” But a good objective might be, “Refresh the brand identity to increase brand recognition and engagement.” 

Part of clarifying these objectives is defining the target audience(s), documenting key messages, designing a codified brand persona in order to generate a targeted feeling and perception, and setting appropriate metrics to measure success. 

As a general rule, try to aim for 2-3 well-defined objectives that are clear in their intent and outcome. You should be able to complete the answer to this question when you are done writing your objective: “I’ll know I have accomplished this objective by/because…”

2. Secure stakeholder input and buy-in early

The Brand and Marketing teams are critical to every brand launch, but other teams such as Sales, Product, HR, Web Development, Social, Comms/PR, and Events should also align and contribute to the launch.

A best practice for brand launch planning is to interview each respective team’s executive stakeholders. You not only want to brief the teams on your plans and objectives, you also want to ask for input, understand their roadblocks, and answer any questions they may have about how the project will affect their team and daily workflow. After any feedback has been integrated into the launch plan, circle back with all teams to cultivate excitement and communicate expectations regarding their roles, responsibilities, and impact in making the brand launch successful.

3. Define a launch strategy as soon as possible

A launch strategy is your best defense against any overwhelm and miscommunication across the launch process. Aligning on an activation strategy helps all teams know what and when to expect changes in assets, scripts, and protocols. Depending on the size of your team, the complexity of your product, and customer needs, you may determine that one of these two common strategies works best for your efforts. 

Light-switch approach

If you want to launch all parts of your brand at once across channels, geographies, and asset types, consider the light-switch approach. While this method has the distinct advantage of delivering instant consistency across all brand properties in the market, it can also take much longer to plan and prepare for, often taking on a “waterfall” project schedule. 

Phased approach

If you don’t need to launch all deliverables at once, a phased approach might be ideal. This will help spread out the launch effort based on priority order. This method decreases the time to initial launch, but it does leave room for (temporary) inconsistency in the brand stack. Assets that don’t immediately launch need to follow shortly after launch in more of an “agile” project management schedule. 

The launch phases should be determined by what matters most to your teams. Criteria for determining your priority order include asset popularity, site traffic, and time-sensitive needs.

4. Create a solid inventory

To ensure you prioritize appropriately and nothing falls through the cracks, creating a full inventory of brand assets that may need to be treated before launch is wise. This can give you a visual and shareable understanding of exactly what needs to be rebranded and how these assets fit the company’s launch goals. If you haven’t built an inventory yet, now is the time to do so. You (or your team members) might be surprised how many places your brand lives!

5. Set a realistic timeline

Accurate timelines can make or break a launch (and your sanity). It’s not only important to understand how and when different assets will be in the market and when the customer sees each of your brand touchpoints, it’s also important to set your team up to be successful in their contributions––and set expectations with other stakeholders within the company.

One way to begin plotting your timeline is to start with your ideal launch date and then work backward, placing deadlines and milestones along the way to keep your team on track.

6. Don’t underestimate the time to brief the company

At this point, you’ve hopefully gathered input and briefed each team on the launch process and implications. But there’s so much more to ensuring your new brand’s success when it comes to team culture and internal activities. Perhaps new sales scripts need to be circulated and rehearsed. Perhaps new brand messaging requires changes in customer service protocol. There may be multiple business units in different markets, cities, or even countries that need to be coordinated to ensure brand continuity. Not only is a united front important from a market-facing point of view, but it’s also key to celebrating and generating enthusiasm from a company culture point of view.

7. Ensure post-launch success

Measure

Be sure to set your plan up with ways to measure the brand launch’s success once it’s live. Google Analytics on your website can help show page traffic; you’ll need to include click tags in your paid ads, and marketing collateral needs UTMs attached to track interest. 

Of course, you’ll also want to return to your original objectives and measurement plan to determine if and to what extent objectives were achieved. 

Communicate (and communicate often)

When building your communication channels, don’t stop at the launch announcement. New brands take time to get established in the market, so create communication plans that are tailored to each audience and continue following up with them over months beyond the first launch ad or email.

Ask Questions

Consider sending out an employee survey and a customer survey to gather feedback on the new brand’s performance and perception. It’s also wise to set up a database where team members can report glitches, errors, and inconsistencies that need to be addressed.

8. Plan ahead for surprises

You’ve been warned: things will move fast and furious! Make sure you have all of your systems in place to handle what’s to come, including surges in web traffic, orders (with a need for greater fulfillment), and calls to customer service. And have your social media and communications teams ready to engage with all of the chatter.

Inevitably, some parts of the plan won’t go as planned. Maybe part of the website breaks when it’s pushed live. Maybe you get halfway through the schedule and realize a big marketing channel was missed. Maybe the C-Suite needs to push the go-live date up a week to accommodate an unexpected business need.

There must be some level of flexibility with launches. (And yes, that requires tolerance, patience, and resilience.) Just remember that at this moment, only you and the team know how the full plan was intended to roll out. Your customers, clients, and new prospects only see the shiny new assets that go live. So take a breath, celebrate the small wins, and try not to sweat the small stuff!