Mar

How to know when to refresh your brand

For many business owners, building and maintaining a brand comes a bit as an afterthought, coming in secondary to doing ‘the work’ itself. While other business components like finances, operational efficiency, or customer support take the front burner more often, brand is something that can have impact on your success, whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

A ‘brand update’ can be as minimal as updating some of your core messaging, to tweaking your logo, to a full refresh resulting in a whole new look and feel. The extent of it of course depends on how far away your current brand is from what you need it to do, as well as your resources to dedicate towards doing so.

Your brand is your business strategy made visible, and that reflects the needs and desires of your target audience. Neither your strategy nor your audience is static over time, so your brand should evolve along with it in order to make sure it’s serving you well and communicating what you need it to. So how often should you update your brand? There are several factors, both external and internal, that should trigger a brand review that are outlined below. Barring any of those scenarios, however, best practice is to review your brand every 5-7 years - even if only to confirm you’re still on the right track.

If you don’t, you run the risk of your brand getting out of date – which opens the door for a competitor to step in with a stronger and more relevant brand to your audience. So, make it a practice every few years to step back and review your brand within the context of your business, your audience, and the world at large.

Factors that indicate it’s time to update your brand:

You’re updating your company’s core strategy.

Your brand should be your business’ strategy made visible. Let’s say you’ve been in business for several years now, and have noticed some shifts and changes in the corner of the world you inhabit. Perhaps you’ve broadened your offerings a bit and are looking to narrow them down, or maybe you’re looking to expand into new markets. Whatever the cause, if you’re looking to update core strategic positioning like your mission & vision, your business strategy, and especially, your target audience, you also need to assess whether your current brand needs to be updated as well. If you don’t, you risk presenting a brand that’s lagging behind your strategic goals, and it will make connecting with your audience all the harder.

You’ve become aware of cultural sensitivities.

Increasingly, audiences are expecting the brands they interact with to act responsibly and ethically – no business operates in a vacuum away from urgent concerns such as race and gender inequality. Being aware of how harmful stereotypes and imagery impact people is all of our responsibility, and there’s lots to learn and keep learning. So if your brand is positioned in a way that’s harmful to others – regardless of how long you’ve been in business and whether you intended to harm anyone or not – it’s time to update your brand. It’s a wonderful opportunity to show you’re evolving and to grow along with your community.

You need to modernize.

The previous point can also be wrapped up in the idea of modernizing, but there are a few additional scenarios here. One is more specific to your visual brand; as new digital platforms and technologies become part of your brand’s multi-channel experience, you may find that your visual brand is getting a little forced into these spaces. For example, your logo is completely unreadable when you use it as your profile image on Instagram, or perhaps your colour palette isn’t translating well on your website. If you’re struggling to get your visual assets to work where you need them to, it might be time to update. Modernizing may also look like your company pivoting because of technological changes (ie. moving from in-person to an app), which may result in an update to how you express your brand.

You realize your current brand isn’t aligned with who you are, or what your audience wants

I refer to this one as ‘brand creep’ – each day, in small subtle ways, a business’ brand slowly creeps away from its centre. This can be because of employee turnover, lack of brand standards, reactiveness, jumping on trends, or just being caught up in the day-to-day. While it’s totally normal for a brand to grow and evolve over time, if there’s not enough intention and awareness of that evolution it can start to drift apart from what you want to communicate, and how you want your audience to perceive you. If you’re finding it’s hard to grow your audience and connect with who you’re intending to, you may need to take a step back and revisit your brand. It’s a good thing to do every year or two to avoid the dreaded ‘brand creep’.

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