By: Justin Wender and Adrien Maines
In the age of ever-changing, fast-paced growth, keeping your business’ brand up-to-date and consistent is essential, or else you look outdated and quickly disregarded. Two ways to update your brand are through a branding refresh and a rebrand. Here are the reasons you might opt for either option to update your marketing efforts.
Branding Refresh – What is it?
A branding refresh is like getting a fresh coat of paint on the outside of your house. It looks much newer, and people are more likely to notice it walking by, but nothing has fundamentally changed about the house. You like the inside, so there’s no reason to do anything else. To put this in the perspective of a business, a brand refresh usually consists of a logo update, adjusting the company’s color palette, refreshing the website’s fonts, tweaking your brand messaging, and adding new imagery and graphics to your website and marketing materials.
In the last few years, there has been a surge of brand refreshes among very large firms. Companies including Pfizer, Paramount Pictures, and Kia have recently updated their branding with new logos, color palettes, and font styles, among other aspects. Several large chain restaurant groups have a rule of thumb to refresh the branding on their restaurants every 7-10 years.
Overall, if you think your company’s branding is just a bit outdated, but your key messaging is solid, you will want to consider a branding refresh.
When to Consider a Rebrand
Let’s go back to the analogy of repainting your house. This time, however, the inside of your home also needs to be renovated. Perhaps the layout no longer makes sense for your needs, or half the house is a colonial revival clashing with mid-century modern, and you just want it all to make sense!
In business terms, a rebrand makes sense when your company’s vision is taking a new direction, and you may need to do a deeper overhaul of your image. A rebrand might consist of a total logo redesign, adjusting your target audience, moving to a new location, changing the brand name, and updating the company’s internal and external messaging.
Some recent tech rebrands include Facebook’s transformation into Meta, Twitter’s revision to become X, and Google’s change to Alphabet. These changes are more indicative of internal changes than a branding refresh would be, and they demonstrate to customers that the companies put in lots of work to shift their public perception going into the future.
Rebranding is a much more exhaustive approach than the refresh, but if done with good reason, it can be well worth your time when you start bringing in more media attention and new clients.
Refresh Versus Rebrand – Determining What is Right for Your Company
To keep up with the 21st-century business world, you must constantly adapt. Your choice between a refresh or rebrand ultimately falls on you, but when making your decision, there are some key questions to consider:
- Do you have collective buy-in from your key decision-makers?
- What resources do you have to put into a change of branding?
- Do you need to change your branding now, or will there be a better time in the future?
- How deep do you need to go when transforming your branding?
Thoroughly entertaining, understanding, and answering these questions will give you valuable insight into when and how to update your branding. Let us know if we can help!