4 reasons why it’s time to give your brand a facelift
Your brand affects so much more than a letterhead or a business card, your brand is the result of every experience and interaction — current and potential — that customers have with your company. If a rebrand isn’t high on your list of business priorities or if you’re wondering how your visual identity affects your customer base, then here are four reasons why it’s time to give your brand a facelift.
1. Your brand looks like every other brand in your industry
There are many reasons why your brand identity might be starting to look a bit drab or blending in with your competitors. If you’ve had your logo for a long time you might find that it’s not standing out any more, as it’s starting to look like the standard logo for a business in your industry.
If your company was a start-up and getting your service offering sorted was a bigger priority, maybe you haven’t had enough cash flow for a brand strategy or a professionally designed logo until now. Your logo could even be a generic one you copied a few years back from a clip art icon or found on a stock website.
Whatever the reason you’ve been putting off getting a professional to look at your brand, I highly recommend having a look at how much time and effort (by effort I mean cash) you can put into investing in an updated brand identity for your company. All companies experience brand iterations while they climb their way to financial success. Does anyone remember Airbnb’s first logo?
Your brand identity is the face of your company and you want it to immediately speak to people and let them know what differentiates you from your competitors. People might have been told not to judge books by their covers but the same isn’t true for your brand. You may need to do a rebrand slowly and gently if you are a digital product, but feel free to rip the bandaid off if you’re not.
2. You’re trying to connect with a new customer base
If you’ve recently realised you need to target a new set of customers with your offering, you’ve recently changed what you offer or your business is expanding it may be a good time to have a look at how your customers identify with your brand. Compare this to your brand strategy and company goals. You want to make sure that your brand offering aligns with your intended customer base so that it’s something potential customers will seek out, and that current customers identify with or aspire to.
If you’ve decided that your customer base is changing, the first step is to identify who your intended audience is. The best way to do this is through user research. There are dedicated research and user experience designers whose job it is provide a detailed analysis of your customer base. Once you know who your target audience is, it’s important to be aware of how they will experience your offering and their relationship to your brand. A bank for example will have a different way of approaching a customer than a chocolate brand might have, even if the customer base is the same.
A good way to make sure that you are on the right track with your brand is to map out the tone of your brand. Your brand tone is not just the words you write to your customers, it also defines the kind of imagery you might use, the design style and appropriate colours. If you sell a luxury product it’s good to think about how things such as paper stock and the printing process of your brand collateral can make your brand seem more appealing.
If you are a more affordable brand you might want to go down a more fun colourful route. Most banks for example are blue toned, serious and reassuring, however the Kiwi investing app Sharesies subverts this and uses bright pink, funky illustrations and a colloquial Kiwi tone of voice to get on their customers level.
Sharesies want their customers to know that although they are a financial app, they are approachable, friendly, and provide advice without judgement. This approach has worked really well for them because they focussed on what sets them apart and what makes them different, while also being aware of the current financial landscape and people’s relationship towards financial institutions.
3. You’ve gotten off on the wrong foot
A bad reputation doesn’t just mean a decline in sales or less money in your pocket. A bad reputation means a loss of credibility and trust in your company. This could be because of a key person of the company putting a foot wrong, it could be the result of changing market expectations, or it could simply be the result of consistently negative interactions with your brand.
One way to build back trust in your service is to take a look at the places that your customers criticise the experience or simply start dropping out of your sales funnel. These are areas where you can focus on in your rebranding efforts.
Focus on the positive. If your company has recently closed down all of its solar farms, it may not be the right landscape to focus on this right now. However if the reason you’ve done this is to reduce the cost of power to lower income neighbourhoods, maybe you could focus on that in your brand strategy instead. The value that a rebrand has here is that it’s a good time to shift people’s focus away from the negative connotations of your old brand and begin with providing a new experience in a more positive light.
4. You want to represent a new company mission
If your company has recently changed its focus or mission, now is the best time to rebrand, as you’re able to build a positive brand that is focussed around your new values and goals. Part of your facelift should focus on understanding your new mission and letting customers know what kind of offering you now provide and why.
Why are you changing your companies offering and what do you want to achieve by this? Have you started offering a new kind of product or service, or are you a market leader in a new kind of technology? If your company has gone through a merger or acquisition, make the change visible.
Your rebranding strategy should take into account your existing brand. How do your staff see your brand? How do your customers? Just ask them!
Consider your competition too — what’s happening inside your sphere? Lastly consider the global environment — what’s happening outside your sphere? To connect with customers an evolving market you need to take a look at global trends.
What are the trends that affect the way your customers see your company and your service offering? These could be things like globalisation, digital media, communication technology or veganism. The landscape is constantly changing and it’s important to be aware of how this affects how customers perceive your brand.
The result of updating your brand identity is that you get to redefine who your company is and how your customers see you. You get to design something that helps you stand out from competitors and can shift the focus away from any negative connotations from your old identity.
A new brand identity opens your company up to a truckload of new users, and represents your company more honestly. A good identity is one that can evolve over time, one that customers connect with and identify with and one that you can feel proud to be a part of.
You can check out my branding work over at: www.sophiadesigns.co
