Don’t get stale – rebrand, refresh or redevelop

Ever get the feeling that your brand isn’t as relevant as it used to be? As an agency, you’re probably expecting us to tell you it’s time to rebrand, but the truth is there are plenty of courses of action that are less drastic.

Time for something new

This excellent article on entrepreneur.com explains several of the reasons it might be time to update your brand, but in short it’s about staying relevant – what might have seemed fresh or was successful previously might not be as ‘now’ as it once was, and your company may have grown or evolved into something that’s no longer represented properly by its branding.

If you’re the sharp business-person we think you are, you’ll have a good instinctive idea of when it’s time to slough off some or all of your old branding, but there are challenges – the process is time-consuming and involves many internal meetings and negotiations as well as reliance on branding experts, designers and developers to take your concepts forward.

All change?

But changing things up doesn’t have to mean a full rebrand, which can be expensive by the time you’ve brought it across all internal and external collateral and communications. There are other options that are less extreme but can achieve results in a similar spectrum, but allowing for a refresh of your existing brand.

A simple refresh might mean leaving your logo alone but updating the surrounding corporate brand image, with colours, photography and supporting straplines all up for review. You can also consider your company’s values and core messages as part of a review that takes marketing to its logical core – the nature of your business itself.

We’d always advise seeking assistance from outside your organisation for things like this. It’s not just a fresh pair of eyes – it’ often more the act of being called upon to really explain your business and your brand to an outsider that can open up new perspectives on what you are, what you do, how you operate and what you stand for.

Redevelop

Aside from all this soul-searching, however, there can be more mechanical reasons for needing an update, especially where your website is concerned. It’s surprising how many businesses there are out there who have non-responsive websites despite so much traffic coming from mobile sources (including B2B websites). And likewise while you may have spent thousands on your site four years ago, technology changes, styles advance and to stay relevant you need to keep up. If anyone can tell your site is out of date just by looking at it, that reflects badly on your whole business.

The good news is that if your site’s content and flow of information is already good, and its Google performance is already strong, then the changes can be purely in terms of the build and the cosmetic appearance. So, in theory, a site redevelopment shouldn’t cost nearly as much as a brand-new website, unless of course the rebranding exercise you’ve just undertaken means that everything about you has changed…