Is it time for a Brand Refresh or Rebrand
As entrepreneurs, sometimes hitting a plateau in our businesses or being faced with competition means we need to consider changing something about our business. This is often a good thing. Change can not only rejuvenate our businesses, but also inspire creativity and excitement for the future.
You’re probably wondering what a brand refresh is. Well, let’s start with the basics. A brand refresh or rebrand is a great way to keep your brand fresh and engaging for new and existing customers. The process can be very exciting for those involved but can also seem daunting. Before you begin a brand refresh, there’s a number of steps you should take.
A brand refresh is when you don’t necessarily change your logo or anything that drastic, but you change your brand to be something new and more relevant to your business. A great example of this is when Coca-Cola changed their slogan from “Always Coca-Cola” to “Taste the Feeling.”
An important step in growing a business is ensuring you have the right tools to communicate with your customers. You need an online voice that aligns with your current brand and your new brand. A strategy for getting customers to notice and remember your new brand identity is essential for the growth of your business. In this blog, I’ll go through 7 easy steps that will help you through a successful brand refresh.
Let's get started!
Step 1: Define your brand & mission
The first step in refreshing your brand is to define who you are as a company. You need to identify what makes your business unique and how you want your customers to perceive you. Your brand mission is a concise statement that captures the reason why your business exists. It tells your customers what value you're bringing them and how you do it better than anyone else. You may have already done this during your initial branding process, but it's worth revisiting before you begin a refresh.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Brand Elements/Identity/ Refresh Your Visual Identity
After you’ve uncovered your brand’s unique qualities and what makes it different from others, you can begin to create a new brand identity that expresses these qualities. Your logo is the first thing people will see, so it’s the most important part of your brand refresh. The goal is to revitalize your current logo while still keeping it recognizable. A great way to do this is by changing up the font of your existing logo and freshening up the color scheme. This is where a Professional Designer can come in handy. As long as you know what you want, a skilled designer will be able to turn your vision into reality. My partnered designer, The Femmepire Firm is my go to. Remember to refresh all branding elements, brand voice and messaging, visual identity and tagline.
Step 3: Identify Your Brand's Strengths and Weaknesses/Conduct a SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a tool that can help you analyze your brand from multiple angles, from internal strengths and weaknesses to external opportunities and threats. This stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Your brand's strengths are those attributes that give you a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Strengths: What are you good at? What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw on that others can't?
Weaknesses: What could you improve? What should you avoid?
Identifying the Weaknesses of Your Business
Your weaknesses are those areas where your company falls short when compared to others in your industry. For example, you may be a small operation with limited resources, or your product may be lacking in certain features compared to competitors. You may have high overhead expenses that make it difficult to compete on price. Or your website might have limited functionality, for example.
Opportunities: Based on your strengths, what opportunities can you find to maximize your brand?
Identifying the Opportunities for Your Business
An opportunity is something that could benefit your business if you act on it effectively. For example, perhaps there's an opening in the market for a new product or service you could offer. Or perhaps there's a new marketing channel you could utilize.
Threats: Based on your weaknesses, what threats do you face?
They might include:
• Experienced management team
• Unique product features
• Recognizable brand name
• Low-cost provider
• Innovative company culture
Step 4: Redesign Your Website
Now that you have a refreshed logo and color pallet, it’s time to redesign your website with these elements in mind. This step is crucial, because it will give your customers their first impression of your new brand identity – make sure that impression reflects who you are as a business or personal brand. If your website is outdated or hard to navigate, now would be the perfect time to update it with more modern design elements, search engine optimization and functionality.
Step 5: Analyze Your Competition/ Research Your Industry and Competitors
Once you’ve identified what makes your brand unique, take a look at how your competition communicates their own brands. What do they do well? What could they improve? Identify any gaps or opportunities that exist between their brands and yours. This will help you see how to differentiate yourself from competitors and provide value over them.
Step 6: Engage + Know YOUR Audience: Create Personas For Your Customers
Your personas represent the people who buy from you and or use your services. They may include the types of people who work in certain roles, like a CEO or CMO, but they’re also very specific to each individual customer. As an example, if I were creating personas for my business, I would start by thinking about how different types of customers might experience my website or service offering differently from others based on their needs and motivations.
Engaging with your audience is a good way to understand them and learn about their needs. You can use this information to research how your business is perceived and how it can improve.
Step 7: Create A Brand Brief or Strategy
This is a document that outlines the key ideas and information you need to get started on a brand refresh. It helps you understand your audience and the challenges they face, as well as the goals of your project.
The brand brief summarizes your business and its goals. It’s important to know what you want out of a brand refresh before launching into the process, so that you can be sure you stay on track and avoid any setbacks.
Create your brand brief by answering these questions:
· What are your company’s core values?
· What problem does your product or service solve?
· Who is your target audience, and what do they need?
· What is unique about your product or service?
· How do you want customers to feel when they interact with your brand?
Take away:
Keep your business goals in mind. If you're trying to build an audience, attract investors, or increase sales of your product or service, clearly defining your brand will help you decide exactly how you want to grow your business. Nail down each piece of the puzzle, from your brand voice to your visual identity and then create a plan for implementing it. This is a difficult but necessary process, and it will lead to the growth of your business.
Make sure you have all the right tools in place first—then you can take those final steps towards success. If you are ready to take the next step for your rebrand or brand refresh schedule a free discovery call to find out how we can partner.
