Many companies are improving their products or services with AI and want to refresh their brand – the process of changing a brand’s image, voice, or other aspect of business without losing its core message.
Ideally, a brand evolves over time, changing the way it looks, feels, and content. The intentional and consistent growth of brand equity over time is called brand evolution. This series of slow, deliberate changes reflects the company’s growth and market position. Good brand evolution is incremental and intentionally follows business growth.
A brand refresh can help maintain customer trust, retain your business identity, and create continuity while strengthening your brand presence. Let’s take a look at how to properly refresh a brand to grow your business and build customer loyalty.
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Top reasons to refresh rather than rename
A refresh provides continuity, reassuring customers that the brand is still alive and well, just with a makeover.
But there are times when a more radical or sudden change is necessary, and a rebrand can make sense: when a company gets rid of existing brand materials and starts from scratch, completely changing its identity, its message, its mission and sometimes even its name.
Most companies resort to a complete rebrand just to survive a PR crisis or integrate with another company, which requires building a new shared story. However, a rebrand risks alienating or excluding your existing customer base.
A refresh shows that you understand your market and respond positively to a changing world. This often comes down to maintaining your existing customer base, assuring customers of your continued excellence, and building trust.
Here’s what to look for when refreshing your brand:
- Maintain buyer confidence: Buyers expect the same treatment they have always received.
- Strengthen brand recognition: Give customers a familiar feel for your brand even if you change its appearance.
- Create continuity: As your business grows, take your customers with you on this journey.
- Demonstrate modernity and growth: Show that you are aware of your position in the market and your ability to adapt.
Responsibilities of a Brand Refresh Team
A brand refresh is a group project. Individual contributors can participate in the creation, but the leadership team must define the vision. Without a clear idea of what executives want customers to feel and think about the company, creatives will fail when telling the refreshed brand story.
Here are the roles and responsibilities of a brand refresh:
- Management team: Define the new company vision while maintaining the company’s existing message and story.
- Directors/management: Communicate the vision and manage the creations.
- Creative team: Create a new message, look and feel that creatively interprets the leadership team’s vision and illustrates the company’s story.
How to protect brand continuity
To best protect your brand, work with management to define the desired outcomes of the refresh. Here are some ways to strategize your refresh before contacting the creative team.
- Let leaders decide the vision: How does the team want the new branding to make customers feel? What descriptors, examples from other disciplines, and selling points should the final product include?
- Define continuity elements: Provide guardrails for change by designating which parts of the brand should stay. This could include color, word choice, sentiment, or parts of the visual representation that best represent the brand.
- Consult your existing brand guide: Consider why previous branding decisions were made. Which ones should stay and which ones are negotiable?
- Document decisions: Document how and why you made decisions about updating in case problems arise later.
Refresh to stay relevant
Brand refreshes are essential to the growth of your business because they show that your brand is growing and evolving over time to stay relevant. Complete brand changes are generally not necessary unless your business is undergoing a drastic change.
Change can be scary, but your teams will experience a refresh. Plan and act with the customer in mind, maintain consistency and stay true to your company’s core message and story, and you’ll maintain customer trust throughout the refresh process.
