Exploring Rebranding: Insights from My Licentiate Thesis Journey

Happy to share some thoughts about rebranding in my licentiate thesis. Thank you Halmstad University and Katarina Tran for the conversation.

For the news link, click here for English and here for Swedish.

---

The amount of businesses worldwide that are branching out to foreign markets to capture a greater market share has never been greater. In that process, rebranding is a crucial asset for a company’s expansion. This is shown by Manoella Antonieta Ramos da Silva, PhD student at Halmstad University, in her research. At the same time, there are different barriers in developed and emerging countries that must be overcome by businesses that aim to expand to other nations.

A world map of how businesses expand worldwide.

There are several advantages for companies to move across national borders, for instance the chance to increase competitiveness, expand brand portfolio, and achieve rapid growth. Multinational enterprises tend to go through acquisitions of existing, well-known, and proven brands to, for instance, minimize high costs and risks of product development. However, to succeed as a global brand, enterprises must figure out how consumers in various environments consume.

Manoella Antonieta Ramos da Silva is a PhD student in Innovation Sciences with a focus on business economics at Halmstad University. In her licentiate thesis that will be presented, she has explored rebranding, that is, how companies that want to expand to the international market need to change their corporate image for it to work on a new market.

More than cultural barriers

“In this globalized world, understanding context and culture is becoming increasingly important. Businesses need to consistently identify and differentiate its products or services across cultural, linguistic, and geographic markets. To brand internationally, a firm needs to acclimate – not only by the brand name – but also its visual identity, packaging design and marketing methods according to the national contexts. It is very complex”, says Manoella Antonieta Ramos da Silva.

Manoella Antonieta da Silva has above all explored business-to-business multinational enterprises in the life science industry. International growth through international acquisitions, she explains, is a common practice in the sector:

“The life science industry experiences institutional differences between different national markets. I have explored how the rebranding process is implemented in the life science industry and what challenges the businesses face”.