Through complacency, declining sales, or a changing market landscape, a brand refresh is a pivotal strategy to rejuvenate a company’s image and re-engage its target audience. But giving your brand a fresh look does not guarantee a solution to these problems. It could result in worse performance than your current branding offers.
Even though refreshing a brand is less of an overhaul than a rebranding campaign, even subtle changes to your brand message and visual identity require careful consideration. This article aims to unlock what’s required for a successful brand refresh, helping you take the proper steps for implementing it as a part of your brand strategy.
What is A Brand Refresh
A brand refresh is a nuanced modification of existing brand elements to remain relevant and appealing in today’s market. It’s not a complete overhaul, like rebranding, but more about finetuning the messaging, visual identity, and other aspects of your existing brand to better align with the preferences of your target audience.
When undertaken with strategic insight, it marries the essence of your brand’s tradition with the evolving demands of the modern consumer, ensuring optimization of brand awareness and recognition for current and new audiences.
Balancing Modernization With Tradition
Unlike the process of creating a new brand design, a branding refresh includes several steps to understand what the current brand identity must include with the new look. Many brands forego these pivotal steps, costing them significant brand recognition and resulting in a performance loss.
Brands must consider the push and pull of evolving consumer preferences to ensure product loyalty before they push for greater brand awareness to a new audience.
Why Do A Brand Refresh?
The most common reason for a refresh is declining revenues. Even if it is so tiny that it does not, your CFO barely notices a subtle decline in sales, which could be a sign of things to come. While revenue losses are the symptom, you must look for the root cause as to why brand performance is slipping.
- Outdated Brand Identity: The visual elements like logo, colors, and design no longer resonate with the contemporary audience, leading to reduced purchases.
- Shift in Target Demographics: The core audience the brand initially targeted has evolved or shifted, causing a misalignment with current marketing efforts.
- Changing Market Dynamics: Introduction of new competitors or disruptive technologies in the market that have captured a portion of the brand’s customer base.
- Evolving Consumer Preferences: What consumers value or expect from brands may have changed over time, causing them to choose other products or services.
- Inconsistent Brand Messaging: Confusing or inconsistent messaging across different channels can reduce trust and decrease sales.
- New Product or Service Offerings: Introduction of new products or services that don’t align with the current brand identity, causing confusion or misalignment in the market.
- A decline in Brand Loyalty: Data shows that once loyal customers are switching to competitors or alternative products, it leads to lost sales.
Of course, the demand for a brand refresh isn’t always a result of doom and gloom. Brands who see a unique opportunity to align with a new audience may use a brand refresh to push themselves in the right direction to attract new customers.
Benefits Of A Brand Refresh
The job of a brand is to stay in tune with contemporary shopper behaviors without sidelining the existing customer base. A brand has to keep tabs on the modern trends that have a heightened consumer appeal. A brand refresh presents an opportunity to analyze these strategies, where you improve the look and messages to increase your digital and physical footprint.
Refreshing a brand can save you from being delisted or help you strengthen your current position in the market. When taking a new approach, a brand refresh can help you widen your reach, capturing the attention of a new audience through a more refined position.
What Elements of Branding Can You Refresh?
While every design element can be enhanced, a refresh focuses on specific presentation categories. Key areas that often benefit the most from a refresh include:
- Website Design: Ensuring user-friendly navigation, updated content, and a visual aesthetic that excites.
- Logo: Subtle changes can modernize the brand’s image.
- Packaging design: Attract consumers on the shelf or online for increased product trial and repeat purchases.
- Social media: Creating consistent, engaging visuals that connect with the target audience better.
A brand refresh can create a cohesive and contemporary brand presentation across all touchpoints by zeroing in on these areas.
Steps For A Successful Brand Refresh
A successful brand refresh strategy is equal parts strategy, creative, and testing, which we will cover in this part of the article. It requires a unified alliance between the brand manager, creative director, marketing director, and a brand refresh agency to identify what’s timeless and the best way to move the brand forward.
Customer & Shopper Engagement
A brand audit looks at the company and its products to establish a baseline understanding. Within a brand audit, we deep dive into the company, its current and target audience, its competitors, and the sales channels where it currently operates. Collectively, a brand refresh specialist will have a comprehensive understanding of the level of their brand equity and essence.
At SmashBrand, our brand strategists review all company reports and documentation, perform social media listening, visit retail stores, and leverage tools like surveys and consumer panels to gather invaluable insights. The audit is one of the most essential parts of a brand refresh process.
Positioning Through Brand Messaging
Effective brand positioning, where you streamline a narrative of the most to least important benefit, is how you cut through the noise of competitive shelves and listings. Since the words most accurately describe the brand story and showcase the brand voice, they are the first aspect of the refresh we change.
Reimagining The Packaging Design
While strategy and testing create the opportunity for a data-driven brand refresh, exploring creative concepts is how you distinguish your visual design from competitors and infuse design elements that present the brand’s soul.
You must explore various approaches to the brand’s position, finding the most impactful way to visually communicate the message in those 5-15 seconds when a consumer makes a purchase decision.
Validating Through Brand Testing
An item that does not exist on most company’s brand refresh or rebrand checklist is consumer testing each aspect of the refresh. Our PackWords™ and PREformance™ testing ensures the brand refresh attracts potential customers while continuing to serve existing customers.
Integrating Digital and Physical Touchpoints
We live in an omnichannel world, and for brand consistency to occur, you must ensure that your new refresh is broadcast accurately online and in retail stores. So, in a packaging refresh, your design team will need a set of current brand guidelines to ensure each piece of marketing material and digital collateral consistently represents the brand.
Articulating the Refreshed Brand Vision
But it isn’t just your design and marketing departments that must be aware of the change. All team members must understand the brand guidelines for speaking visually and auditorially with the target audience. It may seem overkill, but inconsistency in brand colors, font styles, and tone of voice on touchpoints such as email signatures and phone support impacts the brand’s essence.
Incorporating Continuous Optimization
The real work begins when the refresh is complete. Like a successful rebrand, you only understand its impact over a period of time. And while certain aspects of the refresh are static and hard to change, others are more fluid and can be optimized as long as they remain within your brand theme.
To continuously monitor feedback, employ real-time analytics, first-party data, social listening, and shopper feedback tools to finetune post-refresh. Yes, you will need to invest in these data sets and reporting tools continuously.
Refresh Pitfalls And How to Sidestep Them
While the risks of rebranding may be more permanent and damaging to a brand, a company can experience a drop in performance after a refresh. Here’s what to look for and how to mitigate these potential brand refresh mistakes.
Consumer Confusion
Risk: If abrupt changes are not communicated effectively, consumers might get confused about what the brand stands for.
Mitigation: Conduct thorough market research before implementing changes and ensure clear communication about the changes to the audience.
Dilution of Brand Equity
Risk: Too many changes might weaken the brand’s reputation and value.
Mitigation: Retain core elements that resonate strongly with the existing audience while making incremental changes.
Inconsistency Across Platforms
Risk: Discrepancies in brand presentation across different channels can confuse consumers and weaken trust.
Mitigation: Ensure all branding materials, both digital and physical, are updated consistently and cohesively.
Alienating Loyal Customers
Risk: Long-time customers might feel the brand they loved has moved away from its original ethos.
Mitigation: Engage with loyal customers, gather feedback, and involve them in the refresh process to ensure you hear their feelings and opinions on the change.
Inadequate Research
Risk: Basing the refresh on assumptions or superficial data can lead to misguided decisions.
Mitigation: Invest in comprehensive market and consumer research to ensure changes align with consumer needs and preferences.
Poor Execution
Risk: Even if the strategy behind the refresh is solid, poor execution can lead to unfavorable results.
Mitigation: Collaborate with experienced designers, strategists, and communication experts to ensure flawless implementation.
Lack of Internal Alignment
Risk: If company employees and stakeholders are not on board or informed, they might not represent the refreshed brand correctly.
Mitigation: Conduct internal workshops and training sessions to ensure everyone understands and aligns with the new brand direction.
Refreshing A Commodity Category
In the fiercely competitive realm of bottled water, the allure of package design branding becomes paramount to captivate consumers. Evamor, initially a regional contender in the bottled water scene, approached our agency with aspirations to carve a niche on the national stage. Despite boasting a top-tier product, their brand imagery failed to command the spotlight in the marketplace.
Our team delved into crafting a unique brand position, weaving the brand’s narrative, and sculpting a visual representation that exudes refreshing vibes. This revitalized approach turbocharged Evamor’s brand appeal, surging purchase intent by a staggering 300%. Armed with this robust data, Evamor steps forth with renewed vigor and assurance as they venture into fresh markets.
You can learn from this brand refresh case study that no matter how commoditized the product category is, a brand redesign can significantly impact sales performance. Design psychology contributes to all products, whether selling them online, offline, or both.
Data-Driven Brand Development That Can Guarantee Sales Performance.
If you need a refresh with performance predictability, we can help. SmashBrand is a brand development agency that researches, designs, and tests all products to ensure peak shelf performance. Book a time to discuss your project with our team.
The Only Agency To Guarantee A Retail Performance Lift.
