What’s one piece of tactical advice and one piece of strategic advice for a small company (2 person marketing team) that’s doing a product launch and company rebrand at the same time?

Strategic advice: Is it a good idea to do them at the same time? You could separate them and stretch out the pop you’d get from each. Also, can you tie them together? For many companies their brand story is tightly aligned to their product story, this is especially true for product driven companies. Which in my opinion are the type of companies that built to win in the future.

Tactical advice: Do some sort of event for the rebrand. Such a good opportunity to bring people together who you care about and build some momentum with your advocates around your new name and identity.

Hope that helps! 

It sounds like you’re in for a fun and challenging few weeks :). While they’re likely to be stressful, they might end up as some of the most memorable of your career.

I would focus on “doing less” on launch day / rebranding announcement day, then activating with elaborative messages and resources in the following weeks and months.

By “doing less”, I mean that what’s most critical on launch day / rebranding announcement day is that you get your message in front of the right people, and that your message resonates with them. They’ll only be willing to give you a moment of attention, and they’ll only have a tiny bit of space in their brain to allocate to the way they perceive your company and its offerings. So how do you want to be perceived, and what message will make you stand out? Getting to a crisp and compelling announcement message, and ensuring that the message will be effectively distributed, is the first order of business.

So keep your plans for launch day / rebranding announcement day simple. And put together a calendar of all the follow-on ways you’ll get more mileage out of the message in the following weeks and months after launch day / rebranding announcement day, with attention to the resource constraints you have.

In other words: spread it out. Even if you had a team of 100 marketers and a huge budget, there would still be a strong argument for spreading it out.

Strategic advice: Combine the launch and rebrand into a single narrative. Your company rebrand should allow you to position yourself within a story where your customer is the main character and you are the impact character who helps them make progress (think customer = Luke Skywalker and you = Obi Wan Kenobi). Your product would then become the magical gift or power (ie Lightsaber for those still following the analogy) that you offer to the main character to help them along their journey.

Tactical advice: Find a couple of customers who love you and prep them to talk to media that you notify about your launch. In this way, the story shifts from your rebrand (which no one really cares about) to the story of how your customer overcame challenges thanks to your new brand and the magical gifts offered by your product launch.