Why Your Business Needs a Brand Refresh Strategy Before It Needs a New Logo

Your logo doesn't define your brand. Instead, your brand is the entire experience, from customers' thoughts about you to their feelings towards your products and services, that they associate with your business.

Consistent brand investment yields an average of 20% greater growth in revenue over competitors (McKinsey & Company).

What a Brand Refresh Actually Means

A brand refresh means a thoughtful, methodical transition to how an organisation displays itself in the marketplace.

It does not mean a total rebranding which destroys the old brand identity. Instead, it is an intentional reevaluation and recalibration of visual language, messaging, tone, and positioning to align better with the actual condition of business today.

There is a clear delineation between these two types of changes as defined by the Harvard Business Review, where they state that rebranding is indicative of a substantial change in a company’s mission or value; whereas refreshing a brand enhances or modernises an existing brand.

Making this distinction will provide you with the basis upon which to create a case for the leadership team at your company that will encourage them to approve a brand refresh.

The Business Case Your Board Needs to Hear

Brand Equity Is a Measurable Asset

According to the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), brand equity is recorded on a company’s balance sheet as an intangible asset.

This value represents the commercial benefit a company derives from its customers’ perception of its brand name.

It is widely recognised that perceptions can be powerful; Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report illustrates this point by noting that the top 100 global brands have a combined brand equity value in excess of $3 trillion, indicating that perception is a critical form of business capital.

If a brand’s visual identity becomes obsolete or disconnected from how its audience interprets its message, the value of the asset will diminish over time.

An appropriate brand refresh allows a company to protect and increase the value created by years of investment in marketing.

Consumer Trust Declines Without Consistency

Published since 2001, the Edelman Trust Barometer continues to show that consumers are more likely to trust a brand if it has consistent visual and tonal elements (the "voice" of a brand).

Brands that have maintained a cohesive and up-to-date identity at all consumer touchpoints have significantly higher levels of trust than those whose communication is fragmented or out of date.

The direct correlation between trust and purchase intent is unquestionable. According to Nielsen's Global Branding Report, 59% of consumers state that they prefer purchasing from a brand that they know, so consistent brand-building is critical to building revenue as well as visual aesthetics.

The Warning Signs That a Refresh Is Overdue

Your Visual Identity Was Built for a Different Era

Print media, television, and other traditional outlets had to look different from how content would appear in a digital environment, as a result of needing different types of visuals based on whether you were using your mobile device, viewing a video, or going through a social media service.

An example could be that a logo created in the mid 2000's could have been designed primarily for print, but will not produce the same results when used as a user profile icon on a social network.

In 2015, Google changed its identity from its serif logotype to a geometric sans-serif because it would allow it to have a clean visual statement across all sizes and shapes of devices.

The reason Google said they made the change was mainly that they wanted to have their brand adaptable to new surfaces, rather than simply because they thought the new logotype looked better than their old one.

Your Messaging No Longer Reflects Your Offer

Businesses evolve: new services are added, target audiences shift, and competitive positioning changes.

When the language on a website or in marketing materials no longer accurately reflects what a company does or who it serves, the brand is working against the business rather than for it.

Salesforce, originally a CRM platform, undertook a significant brand messaging refresh as it expanded into a broader business operating platform, according to its own published brand guidelines and investor communications.

The visual and verbal identity had to expand to match the evolved product reality.

Talent Acquisition Is Suffering

LinkedIn's 2022 Global Talent Trends report identified employer brand as one of the top five factors candidates evaluate before applying to a role.

A brand that looks dated or communicates a culture that no longer exists will lose qualified candidates to competitors whose identity accurately signals what it is like to work there.

The cost of a poor employer brand is measurable: LinkedIn found that companies with weak employer brands pay an average of 10 per cent more per hire to attract the same quality of candidate.

A refresh that addresses internal as well as external brand communication directly reduces recruitment costs.

How a Structured Refresh Differs From a Redesign Sprint

Strategy Must Precede Aesthetics

Brand revitalization is a change to the branding of your business. A change in the design, colour, and typeface of a product or service is an obvious part of the change.

However, if that design is applied without a clear positioning of the company's products and services will not solve the underlying problems

Design-led businesses that incorporate strategic thought into their branding practices significantly outperform (by 228% over the course of 10 years) the S&P 500 by virtue of being able to articulate a clear strategic intent for the brand. 

The success of a brand is not the result of an aesthetically pleasing design; specifically, it is due to an influential brand's strategic direction, which in turn leads the business towards a clear and consistent statement about the future of the business.

Stakeholder Research Is Non-Negotiable

In order to create a solid starting point for brand refreshment, you must understand what existing customers, employees and prospects think of your brand today.

Only after conducting brand awareness audits via customer interviews and conducting a competitor analysis before redesigning anything can you be sure the resulting designs are indeed a solution to an actual problem rather than just a costly new look.

One way to approach this is to find an agency that has experience in this type of work, including following the principles outlined in the brand refresh strategy framework developed by Fazer Agency, which follows the philosophy of diagnosis before prescription.

At Fazer, they consider brand refreshment to be more than just a cosmetic change; they view it as a strategic business intervention that improves the business's competitive positioning, aligns with the intended audience and builds long-term brand equity through the timely execution of all elements of the brand upon completion of the plan in a single, coordinated effort.

Implementation Requires a Rollout Plan

If the implementation of an otherwise strategically solid brand refresh does not provide a consistent experience across all company touchpoints, there is no value in the actual refresh.

A phased rollout plan needs to be created for the timing associated with the updating of digital touchpoints, physical touchpoints, selling materials, and internal communications and should be given the same weight as the creative element itself.

Brand governance documentation should also be created with updated brand guidelines covering logo usage, colour systems, typography, tone of voice, and style of photography to provide assurance that any refreshed identity continues to be consistently used by both internal and external teams long after the agency engagement is completed.

Making the Boardroom Conversation Easier

Frame It Around Risk, Not Aesthetics

Risk assessments, not design opinions, drive responses from boards. In the case of brand refresh proposal discussions that are framed as proposals about measured, business impacts such as risk of inaction, deteriorating trust scores, decline of talent pipelines and diminished competitive differentiation, the creative recommendation can become an actual business continuity decision.

Additionally, providing competitor analysis indicating how peer brand(s) have refreshed, along with details of the market response, creates a tangible benchmark against which the leadership will evaluate the opportunity for the financial investment.

In the boardroom, numbers and precedent will always carry much more weight than moodboards.

Define Success Metrics Before You Start

Without specific success metrics for a brand refresh, it can't be assessed, financed, or replicated.

A solid foundation of baseline measurement must be established before starting the project, including brand awareness measurements, net promoter score, website conversion rates, and time-to-hire, allowing for a framework to hold the brand accountable to justify the approved budget to its board.

According to research by Gartner Consulting, marketing leaders are encouraged to link brand investment directly to pipeline metrics and customer lifetime value calculations when presenting to finance and executive management.

This creates the transition of the brand from a discretionary spending category to a performance investment that can be measured for return on investment.

Conclusion

The brand of your business will be one of your long-lasting assets. Individual products may come and go, so will some marketing programs, and sometimes the entire leadership team may change.

Therefore, when you allow your brand to drift out of alignment with the current business reality, you are making an active choice to destroy something of value, not a passive one.

Building compounding advantages in trust, recognition, attracting talent, and customer loyalty occurs in those companies that practice brand refresh as an ongoing and strategic discipline rather than as a reactive response to a brand crisis.

Conversing about brands in the boardroom should be simpler than many teams think when your discussion uses the appropriate language of risk/reward/evidence relative to an aesthetic preference.