Hey, good-looking

They are just the latest in a long line of housing organisations to be bitten by the rebranding bug. North British Housing Group became Places for People in 2000; the Paddington Churches Housing Association was reborn as Genesis Housing Group in 2001; and Broomleigh Housing Association left behind its links with Bromley Borough Council last April to attract new partners as part of Affinity Housing Group. Charities, too, have caught on: Crisis went through a rebranding last summer, and Centrepoint is set to follow suit later this year. Clearly, the trend has been enthusiastically adopted across the housing sector. Why?

"We needed to create a family approach, so that each badge sits within the identity as a whole, which provides a visual glue," explains Peter Jeffery of the rebranding at Anglia, where he is director of communications. "Each subsidiary will have a local identity, but be recognisable as part of a family group.

"People who see a partner logo don't realise the size of Anglia. From a marketing point of view, we're underselling ourselves."

North British Housing Group rebranded as it moved from putting roofs over peoples' heads to creating places where people wanted to live. "The old name implied we just dealt in social housing but Places for People better reflected the role of the group," says communications manager Gabrielle Madden-Ross. Meanwhile, Crisis had recognised that homelessness had moved off the street into hostels and shelters, and that the charity had to follow it there.

"Rebranding was a tiny part of what we did; it was a wholesale repositioning," says chief executive Shaks Ghosh. "People's jobs have changed, the projects have changed, the organisations we work with have changed.

If we were still communicating the old brand messages, people would find it very strange."

But rebranding is still often associated with corporations cynically squeezing new profits from old products – a reputation that sits very uncomfortably in the world of housing associations, where the focus is on improving services rather than boosting revenue – and the word "Consignia" haunts any discussion on the subject like an uninvited guest. As Benoit Wesser, senior strategist with branding consultant Corporate Edge, says: "If the brand changes but the underlying offer doesn't, that's when you leave yourself open to cynicism."

All the organisations mentioned above stress that their rebranding followed marketing, structural or organisational changes. The search for a new identity wasn't the driver of Anglia's rebranding process, says Jeffery, but a crucial passenger: "A new logo isn't just a badge but a symbol for other things going on within an organisation."

With the housing sector undergoing a period of structural change, more and more RSLs can be expected to change their brand in response. As they become promoters of regeneration, providers of support services, enter new relationships with local authorities or undertake mergers, facing the world with their old brands will be like struggling to be taken seriously in a tank top and kipper tie.

The public and not-for-profit sector account for a growing proportion of Corporate Edge's workload, says Wiesser: "They are waking up to the real world, where they have to fight for revenue. They need brand awareness, a sense of what is unique about them," he says.

Charlotte Desorgher, managing director of marketing, and public relations agency The Grand Design, says: "They have to juggle the requirements of looking professional and able to handle to large amounts of public money without looking flashy. It's a fine line."

Desorgher, who has worked in the sector for nearly 20 years with clients such as Hyde Housing Association, says the importance of branding should not be underestimated. "An identity is an incredibly important investment. It's like the clothes you wear – people make instant value judgements based on it."

"You shouldn't change all the time but you should look at how you're coming across in relation to other organisations," says Jim Minton, director of marketing at Centrepoint. "Ask, 'are we standing out as much as we want to stand out?' For instance, we used to have little people in our logo, and that's a very common motif for charities."

Because you're worth it
A brand makoever doesn't come cheap. At Affinity, chief executive Keith Exford prides himself on having stuck to a £30,000 budget – "no more than an average employee costs in a year" – but he's heard of RSLs spending 10 times that.

Be warned, however: Desorgher believes RSLs' understandable desire not to overspend can sometimes turn into false economy. "They try to do it on the cheap, or ask a student to do it, or there have even been cases where the chairman has designed the logo." But she quotes £5000 as the starting price for a new name and logo, and £20,000 as the minimum cost of taking the new brand identity across an organisation's entire operations, so it's hardly surprising that the temptation is there to pinch pennies.

Keeping costs down is important to secure staff support. "If you're a frontline member of staff, it's easy to question why money is being spent on an identity and not on tenants," says Anglia's Jeffery. "You have to get across the rationale that this will strengthen the group in the market and internally."

It's good to talk
Apart from funding worries, another thing that makes rebranding more complex for RSLs than their private sector counterparts is that RSLs have to address several audiences at once: tenants, market renters, financial institutions, government agencies, local authorities. "Branding is about focus but this can be counter-intuitive for not-for-profit organisations, which tend to be founded on broad, inclusive ideals," says Wiesser.

His advice is to isolate and target the key audience. By raising its profile in that area, an organisation will automatically raise its profile in the eyes of other constituents. He cites Centrepoint: "If they can show that X% of young people on the street recognise their name, this keeps the funders happy, and the media in turn will be satisfied that Centrepoint speaks with authority."

Rebranding can bring other benefits, too. Anglia felt that its existing logos looked dated, and that this put its recruitment advertising at a disadvantage. When trying to attract staff in a competitive jobs market, a contemporary look can make a difference, says Jeffery: "Rebranding can capture an organisation's strengths, such as flexibility and creativity, so that people associate Anglia with these issues."

In mergers, rebranding can redirect staff allegiances towards the new organisation.

"A double name perpetuates the sense of division," says Wiesser. "If you have a new name, both sides will be looking at what they've become, not what they've lost."

Today, everyone is brand-aware: we walk the high street making judgements about which businesses are dynamic and forward-looking, and which haven't kept up with their consumers.

But the people making these judgements are also job applicants, tenants or decision-makers in partner organisations. As RSLs evolve and move forward, they will need to be fluent in the language of branding if they are to communicate.