5 Steps to Refresh a Brand
Companies thrive when they periodically refresh their brand, ensuring they stay relevant and top of mind in the ever-changing competitive landscape.
A brand refresh is less substantial than a complete rebrand (which likely includes a name change and logo change) but it is no less serious of a mission as you’re altering one of your company’s most valuable assets.
While building a brand from scratch and rebranding are daunting tasks, refreshing a brand is a project that’s ripe with its own set of obstacles. Stakeholders are plentiful with varied opinions. Resources are often limited. And botching a brand refresh will be a fail in the public eye and may have repercussions for years to come.
Breaking a brand refresh into smaller, strategic steps can make the process less overwhelming and more manageable.
Here are 5 steps that are critical in any brand refresh.
1. Set the Goal of the Refresh. A brand refresh is not merely a cosmetic change. It’s a way to revitalize a company’s identity, better aligning it to the needs of the organization.
Your brand platform is sacred intellectual property. Before slicing and dicing and making sweeping changes to your most valuable asset, it’s important to have a clear goal in mind.
Some brand refresh goals might be:
Target a different audience
Enter a different product or service market
Tighten the brand platform to stand out from competitors in the space
Modernize the brand to prepare for upcoming years of growth
Instill renewed energy and enthusiasm into the brand
After breaking down the needs of the organization, you may even define a primary and secondary goal of the refresh.
Regardless, having a clear goal or goals will help all stakeholders make decisions around the brand refresh.
2. Remove Assets. Now that you’ve established the goal of your brand refresh, you need to identify what no longer ladders up to that goal. Evaluate all assets. From photography and videos to copy and taglines… anything that does not support the goal of the rebrand should be removed. What no longer feels right or looks right should be removed.
Simple brands are impactful brands.
Scrape social pages. Delete old posts. Deleting and discarding creates space for what’s new. In some instances, the removal step will be enough to refresh your brand and refocus your brand on what matters most. If your brand is cluttered and lacks clarity, this step is critically important.
3. Add Assets. Now that you’ve created space, you get to determine what fills that space. Reflecting back on your refresh goal, your new assets need to answer that mission. The creative direction of the new assets needs to address the overall goal. Formal or informal focus groups are important in this step because oftentimes, the internal decision makers are so close to the project, they often can’t see what an average consumer sees.
Just like you roll out new campaigns with all of the new assets, your brand refresh needs to be supported by evergreen assets. “Evergreen” meaning assets you can come back to time and time again as “representative” of your new brand positioning.
You can be subtle about refreshing your brand or you can be more drastic, but you don’t want to be inconsistent.
If your tagline still makes sense, layer on a new campaign tagline or a hashtag that you will start to use more frequently, even in conjunction with your main tagline. Intentionally add new photo assets, graphics, taglines or copy in general.
4. Evaluate The Logo. In a brand refresh, you don’t need to change your logo. If you think a logo change is necessary to address the vast goal of your refresh, think about ways to refresh your logo via a process of removal as opposed to a completely new logo.
Brand examples that have accomplished logo refreshes by simplifying their existing logo or removing aspects of a current logo include Starbucks and Dunkin’. Starbucks simplified their logo by removing the outer rings and the reference to “coffee” while Dunkin’s removed the reference to “donuts.” In both instances, the goal of the simplification was to allow the brand to extend into new product categories seamlessly. Note the aspects that remain unchanged or only subtly changed, including color.
The more you make substantial changes to your logo, the more resources will be needed behind the refresh and the more time the refresh will take to execute.
Two recent examples of substantial refreshes include Eddie Bauer and Baskin Robbins. In both instances, the logo is flipping between serif and sans serif which puts the brand into a different place visually.
For Baskin Robbins, they are looking to execute the change within a franchise environment which layers even more complexity to a refreshed logo rollout as they need to get every franchisee onboard with the rollout or get ready to withstand years of a transition.
5. Communicate About The Refresh. In a brand refresh, both internal and external communications are paramount.
It is critically important to have alignment between everyone who touches the brand internally, especially if they are building assets and content. Making big changes requires big and aligned effort. You can create and maintain this alignment by overcommunicating around the brand refresh.
Even more important are the external communications. Especially with beloved brands, change is difficult for consumers. One of the ways to soften the blow is to engage consumers in the process, whether through social listening, voting, or simply over-explaining the rationale behind the changes.
Two examples of brands riding the wave of the consumer lexicon to drive their rebrand efforts are National Public Radio rebranding to “NPR” and YMCA rebranding to “The Y.”
A refreshed brand communicates to customers that the company is dynamic, innovative, and committed to evolving as customer tastes evolve. Just as breaking down a monumental task into manageable parts leads to a sense of accomplishment, a revitalized brand sparks renewed interest and loyalty among existing and potential customers.
Ultimately, the process of refreshing a brand mirrors the driving forces inside the business, including the overall mission, vision and values as well as short and long term goals. It’s about recognizing the challenges, strategizing effectively, and embracing change with confidence.
By evaluating and refreshing, companies can not only survive but thrive, ensuring their lasting impact in the competitive business landscape.
