When close to 1000 hours
of work have gone into designing and marketing a product and suddenly, because
of legal complications, the product has to be completely rebranded – where does
one begin?
The following story is true. Certain names and details have been
altered to protect the privacy and integrity of those involved. Read Part 1 of the article.
Step 1 – Scramble
Upon receiving the news
that The Tea Council had to be retooled, three things happened almost
immediately. The first was our project manager had a brief meeting with each
individual involved in the project and asked us what was necessary and what was
possible based on what needed to be rebranded. He asked specifically if it
could be done in a week. The second thing that happened almost instantly was a
decision was made on what to now call the conference. It was changed to “The
Tea Lovers Summit”. Finally, an email blast (about 40,000 emails) was sent to
everyone who had already signed up for, or purchased, the summit explaining
that it was being pushed back by one week.
Step 2 – Rethink Possible
My initial reaction was
that it couldn’t be done. For my part, I would have been responsible for
removing any mention of the term “the tea council” from both audio and video of
all content materials. When I considered that I had already put in 100 hours of
work and had to contemplate the host of the conference potentially redoing or
scrapping several interviews, I thought there was no way it could be done along
the desired timeline. Upon deeper reflection, I thought about removing most of
the work from my own time and allowing most of the work to fall on my computer’s
shoulders.
It takes far longer to grow
a hedge than it does to trim it. Removing any specific mention of “the Tea
Council” didn’t mean listening through and completely reediting the interviews
or completely building a new video – the processes that are the most time
consuming – it meant just chopping off a few bits and making a new file.
Luckily the lawyers did a lot of the work for me. Transcripts of every
presentation, which had already been done by our team, were handed over to the
summit presenter’s lawyers and were then transferred over the Council on Teas
legal team for review so as to determine what kind of verbiage would need to be
omitted from the presentations. We discovered that the Tea Council was only
ever specifically mentioned during the introduction and outro of every
presentation. I had the presenter record a standard introduction that used the
new moniker for the conference, which I then replaced with all the previous
introductions, and simply cut any mention of the conference should it have
happened an the end of the presentation. This meant that almost 99% of the
presentation stayed in tact. From there it was a simple replacement of the
audio from the videos with the new presentation audio, instead of building a
brand new video from scratch.
Step 3 – Prepare For a Few Sleepless Nights
Besides all the work on
my end, there was the website which thankfully didn’t have to be rebuilt, only
migrated. All the copy had to be changed, and with all the banners and logos
the style was fine and only the wording had to be tinkered with slightly.
Getting all the content back out took a mere 3 days, and most of that work was
my computer rendering new files - I simply had to be around to set it up and
execute it.
The Fallout
At the end of the day we
had all our materials approved and ready for the new launch a solid 48 hours
before the conference was finally released to the public. Dealing exclusively
digitally meant that no manufactured products had to go to waste. Ultimately,
what it amounted to was nothing more than 24 hours of unwarranted panic because
of course it was possible to rebrand the entire conference. All it takes to do
anything is a competent team, assured in their own strengths, with the
commitment to get the job done. Admittedly, the conference did not achieve the
lofty expectations we had initially set out with, but we learned what our team was
capable of when put under duress – and the response was nothing short of
splendid. Furthermore, we learned a very valuable lesson – before you do
anything, do your research.
