Giving New Life To A Brand :: Brand Refresh

As a group that works creating and communicating great brands every day, we’re keenly aware when a brand needs help. These brands have become somewhat stale, are insignificant, or are just dated. This often happens when brands have been around for a while, regardless of size or industry. Factors could include: aggressive competition, becoming ‘lost in time’ with an aging consumer base, or industry changes that render a company’s brand irrelevant.

Many companies try to overcome this situation by rallying with their marketing departments to put together a complete rebrand of the company, hoping to capitalize on the buzz this can often create; however, rebranding a company from the ground up might not be their best bet for several different reasons. For one, rebranding a company tends to erase history in the mind of the consumer. If there is any existing positive brand equity with the brand name or brand mark, a dramatic shift can result in the loss of that goodwill.

Budget concerns can also prohibit a company from completely rebranding. For many companies, rebranding involves not only revision of the corporate stationery, but also storefronts, vehicle graphics, signage, collateral, sales kits, etc. These are large capital expenditures that can be unwieldy, particularly for companies with multiple locations and complex sales and distribution channels.

So what does a company looking to be more relevant do to reenergize its brand?

We recommend exploring a brand refresh. This involves revising a brand’s positioning and branding elements to ensure that messaging is not only strategically sound, but that the brand’s look is brought back up-to-date. These elements provide change in the right direction, while still preserving much of the brand’s existing equity.

One of the most well known examples of a brand refresh happened recently when BP realized that despite solid sales, its brand had begun to be lumped in with those “other big oil companies” that were gouging customers at the pump and polluting the Earth. Knowing this wasn’t an accurate description, they recognized the need to redefine their brand.

The refresh took the form of revising their logo and graphics from looking like a brand from the 1970s to one that looked forward thinking, as well as revising their overall brand message to one that depicted them as a fuel company that was doing positive things for the world, both socially and environmentally.

Before:

After:

Like with BP, a brand refresh done right can provide your brand a much needed spark that allows it to better compete with other companies vying for a slice of your market share, without alienating or confusing your current customer base.

At Orange Element, we’ve done a number of these for our clients over the years, and would love to give your brand a look to see if we can bring it back to life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:04 am. It is filed under Blog Posts and tagged with Thoughts & Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.