Any business leader who’s in some part responsible for translating a company’s brand into stellar marketing has asked themself at one point or another, “do we need a rebrand?”
Trust me, I get it. We’re bombarded by content and might interact with literally hundreds of brands a day. It’s only natural to get a little jealous.
Marketing managers often grapple with pressure to “fix” brands that have grown stale or outdated. But while the idea of starting from scratch with your communications material with total creative control might be alluring, I’m here to tell you there’s another way.
Brand Refresh
Many people underestimate how much flexibility actually exists when reworking or refreshing a brand. There are plenty of changes that can be made within the existing scaffolding without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes your house just needs a new coat of paint, not a full-scale demolition.
A refresh means peeling back the layers of your brand to its essentials, and then building it back up again. You’re keeping the spirit of your brand intact and retaining the recognition and credibility you’ve worked so hard to maintain while still addressing the concerns that prompted you to reexamine your brand in the first place.
A refresh can:
- Tweak a logo while keeping the original character
- Re-energize internal teams and audiences
- Make your brand more accessible and inclusive
- Create momentum for collateral updates
A rebrand might be the right choice in the event of:
- A merger or acquisition
- A major scandal
- A name that no longer aligns with your services
- Your audience has fundamentally changed
- Your logo is structurally unfit for contemporary use
While a rebrand requires a greater investment than a refresh, both options often achieve the same goals. So, let’s address some of the common reasons we fall out of love with our brands and examine when a refresh, rather than a rebrand, might be the smart move.
“My Brand Feels Dated”
Visual trends change year to year, and it’s only natural for brands that were once on-trend to eventually fade into obvious signifiers of a bygone era.
It can be painfully obvious, especially when a brand was built around a particular font or color that was briefly in vogue, such as millennial pink or the hipster vintage fonts that dominated every craft beer label circa 2010.
There are plenty of ways to update the aesthetic surrounding your core brand without a full overhaul. Is it really your full brand that needs to change? Or is it maybe just your website?
Repositioning
With a change in leadership or shifting business priorities, there can be pressure to use rebranding as a tool to reexamine the organization’s broader values. But consider if there’s really anything fundamentally wrong with your brand—or is it just a misdiagnosis of a totally separate business concern.
A visual brand is not a catch-all tool for repositioning and attention. In fact, organizations that believe a rebrand is newsworthy and will garner more attention are often unpleasantly surprised.
Instead of asking a rebrand to carry the weight of revamped positioning, consider engaging in a communications audit to pinpoint the real issue so you can allocate your resources effectively. There’s a good chance a Strategic Messaging Guide or a targeted digital marketing campaign could be the real solution.
Aesthetic Fatigue
Sometimes, internal teams get bored of using the same assets year over year. Perhaps, over time, inconsistencies have developed in the way your brand is implemented across different collateral. Maybe you’ve lost your brand guidelines all together.
But there are plenty of ways to reinvigorate your communication team’s efforts without the complete overhaul of a full rebrand. Are you really tired of your brand? Or just tired of your templates? A new suite of collateral might be your real solution. Or, engaging in a brand refresh gives you new fonts, colors, patterns, photo assets to play with, satisfying your bored graphic designers.
Don’t Burn Your Merch
You’ve spent so much time building brand equity and cool branded merch. Don’t part with it so easily.
A refresh allows your brand to evolve with the times while remaining recognizable. You get to shed the parts that no longer serve you (like a dull color palette), experiment with updated messaging and visuals, and generate fresh energy with your internal teams and audience. All without the existential crisis that is a full rebrand.
A refresh is easier to build internal consensus around and—when done right—often achieves everything a rebrand can at a fraction of the cost. For a full look at what a brand refresh can achieve, scroll through our recent case study for Baltimore nonprofit, Civic Works. Here, we break down the many components that go into a full refresh and how we paved the way for a website redesign with research and strategy, messaging, accessible design, web design, and content creation.
