5 Signs Your Brand Needs a Spring Clean
As with our homes, brands too can gather dust. They can start to feel stale, messy and uninspiring. It's easy to be so wrapped up in the day-to-day of running a business that you forget to check whether your brand is still working hard for you. Is your logo design attracting the right audience, is your website fostering trust? Is your packaging communicating your brand personality?
This time of year is a great opportunity to take a step back and see if your brand identity could do with a light dust, a lick of paint or a full deep clean.
A brand identity is the face of a company, the visual representation of its values, mission, and personality. A strong brand identity has the ability to create a powerful emotional connection with consumers and inspire loyalty, trust and even love. But even the most iconic brands need to refresh their brand identity from time to time to stay relevant and competitive. Here are some of the key signs it’s time to update your branding:
1. Your business has evolved
If you’ve changed your offering or shifted your strategy since you first started, there’s a good chance that your branding has been left behind. Here’s the thing: a brand isn't a static thing – it's meant to evolve and grow as your business evolves and grows. Companies change over time, and their brand identity needs to grow with them to make sure it accurately reflects their current proposition. For example, a company that started as a small boutique clothing store may have grown into a fully-fledged fashion brand - chances are, the same brand identity isn’t going to reflect the new phase of the business. Whether you've expanded or pivoted the business, it’s time to press pause, step back and interrogate whether your branding is still working for you.
2. You want to reach a new audience
Once you’ve launched your company you might find over time that your audience isn’t who you thought it would be when you set out. Perhaps it’s broader, more narrow, or just plain different than it was at the beginning. If you feel like there’s been a shift in who you were talking to at the beginning of your business journey, it could be time to realign your branding to make sure it still resonates with your customers. When you think of your ideal customer, ask yourself if they would be drawn to your brand. If the answer is no, it’s time to realign.
3. the market has become crowded
If you’ve seen new competitors crop up in your space (often with a shiny new brand to boot), you might find you need to differentiate yourself further to stay relevant. If you want to stay competitive in a crowded industry, you need to have a water-tight idea of your brand’s place in the market — what’s your USP, and why should people choose you over your competitors? This clarity and confidence should be communicated through your visuals in a way that engages your target audience. If you aren’t 100% on who you are as a brand, chances are your customers won’t be either.
4. Your branding doesn’t feel fresh
When you started out with your business you might have gone for an aesthetic that felt bang on trend at the time. But times change and fashions evolve. What was considered fresh and modern a few years ago may now appear outdated (and not in a cool vintage way…!). You want your brand identity to be original and unique to you, rather than just something pretty that doesn’t stand out from the crowd. Having a brand identity that’s rooted in solid strategy will also mean that your brand is future-proofed - timeless rather than trend-led designs give your brand longevity.
5. You want to ditch the diy
If you set up your business on a shoe-string, chances are you’ll have DIY’d a lot of the branding yourself. And while we’re all for founders getting stuck in, if you've got big ambitions for your brand then it’s time to stop sweating it on Canva! Brands that haven’t been professionally designed are typically inconsistent, which harms brand awareness, customer loyalty and trust. You should be beaming with pride over your branding and excited to hand over a business card or post something on Instagram. If you cringe every time you direct people to your website, it’s time to wave goodbye to brand shame and level up your look.
Ok, so what does a brand refresh entail?
It’s important to mention that not every brand that resonates with the above will need a full facelift - it might be that some strategic tweaks will get you where you need to be. We can look at your brand together and see if it needs a full revolution or a gentle evolution.
Every brand is different so there’s usually no one-size-fits-all when it comes to a brand refresh. It could be that your logo is really working well for you, but your colour palette and font choice is letting you down. Or perhaps you’ve lost sight of your strategy and don’t have a clear sense of your brand mission. Or maybe you have a really strong packaging design but it’s not translating into your off-pack collateral and you want to establish a really engaging brand world. Whatever stage you’re at we can do a brand audit and diagnose what level of refresh we think will be the most suitable.