Video Transcript

What we’re talking about today is the differences between a rebrand and a refresh. And how do you know which one is right for you? A rebrand is what people traditionally think about when they think about updating their brand. A rebrand is informed by research, both internal and external.

It can involve talking to your customers, talking to your employees, doing a competitive audit, really looking at the landscape that you’re in holistically so we can understand your unique position in the marketplace. And this informs everything else that we do. In a rebrand we’ll often update the logo quite significantly, which can mean a departure from a previous concept or a pretty substantial style change.

A rebrand can, but doesn’t always have to include a name change. It just depends on what is right for you and what’s right for your company. And in a rebrand, we look at all of your brand elements from a messaging and a visual side. And that means both internal and external elements.

So for messaging, what this could mean is new brand values, new positioning, new boilerplate language, a new elevator pitch, a new mission statement, and then some examples of how that plays out in the marketplace — that tone of voice. And on the visual side, we’ll often do a new color palette. Maybe there’s one key color in your logo
that we build off of, new typography, fonts, a new photography library often, and when appropriate, we’ll add in iconography or illustration to really round out your brand.

So brand refresh is still holistic and impacts all areas of your brand, but it’s a lighter touch throughout, so it’s still informed by research, but maybe not as deep of a dive. Maybe we just talk to your employees or people who are easily accessible instead of going out and doing first party research. When we’re updating your logo we’ll often stick with the existing concept.

This works really well, especially if you have a historic mark with a lot of brand equity that needs to be updated for a modern digital age. So we’ll do things like refining letter forms, evening out spacing, cleaning up an illustration if that exists within your logo and making it work across all the applications that it needs to work for in 2022.

We still look at your brand messaging and brand visuals, but we really do an evaluation of what is there, what needs a net new creation and what needs an elevation or a lift. So maybe within the color palette, there’s a few colors that are working really well that we build off of.

Maybe you have one font that you really like and we add a second. Maybe you don’t have any fonts at all, and maybe there are parts of your visual library that need to be beefed up and we go out and we create those. So maybe all of this sounds great to you and you think you’re ready for the next step, but how do you know if your company needs or is ready for a rebrand or a refresh?

Well, there’s probably some pain points in your business that you’re experiencing today that are cues for you to know if you need to take that next step. This can look like a change in leadership. Maybe if you’re a family owned business, you’re moving of one generation of leadership to the next.

It could be a merger or an acquisition where your culture has changed quite significantly. Maybe you just had a huge product launch that moves you into a broader or a different market category. And maybe you just had a huge business strategy shift and maybe your brand values don’t reflect how you do business today.

So how do you know which one is right for you? There’s a couple questions you can ask yourself. Do I have strong, identifiable core components of my brand — both visually and from a messaging standpoint? If the answer is yes, I do, that means you’re probably recognizable in the marketplace very well and it might not be appropriate to have a dramatic shift in how you present so a refresh might be a better fit.

Do my company name and logo accurately reflect who we are and what we do? It’s possible, especially if you’re a company who’s been around the block for a little while, that your name started out reflecting everything you did. But you’ve grown to include more things, and your name isn’t holistic of all the services that you offer anymore. And that could be true of your logo as well. If this is the case, then you might need a rebrand to address both the name and the logo to make it true to you today.