You know it’s time for a rebrand when;

1. You look at your brand image and it seems ‘retro’, and not in a good way.

2. Your logo design no longer represents your business well. Companies do tend to ‘evolve’ over time. Have your products/services and/or your brand ethos changed so much the logo isn’t pulling it’s weight any more in terms of mirroring the message your brand behaviour creates?

3. You’re a little bit embarrassed every time you hand out a business card and find yourself having to explain your business because what they see doesn’t accurately portray it.

4. Your 5 year old child doodled a new logo for you and it actually looked more relevant and a bit more professional than the one you have.

5. Your logo features a font such as ‘Comic Sans’, ‘Papyrus’, ‘Bickley Script’, ‘Enviro’….you know, from ‘back in the day’ when they were acceptable fonts for a professional business.

At the end of the day, as much as you would like to avoid it, most brands will become tired and less relevant over time and need refreshing or even overhauling.

Some Things To Avoid When Rebranding
Obviously a re-brand will usually involve a re-design or re-vamp of your current logo design and even colour scheme, however of course a re-brand is first of all about re-assessing and re-defining the core values and behaviour of your company and after that ensuring your visual image correlates with these definitions if it doesn’t already.

A re-branding exercise may even involve changing your company behaviour if it’s not behaving the way you would like it to (I’m making it sound like a naughty child now!)

1. Stuck In The Past. Don’t cling onto the past, make sure your new brand is relevant to how the company operates today or how you plan for it to operate, and that your imagery backs this up.

2. Plan. Don’t leap straight into a re-design of your current brand imagery without first establishing what your new and improved brand is exactly. This will lead to confusion over the design brief, a brief that keeps changing, and likely dissatisfaction over the outcome.

3. History. Take care not to alienate your existing loyal client base with the new image and/or behaviour…if the change is going to be quite dramatic it might pay to think about making slow changes over time rather than change everything at once.

4. Cover all areas. Once you’ve established what your new brand is, and then recreated your logo design to mirror this, it’ll be far more effective if you include as many other areas of your operation as possible; ideally all areas should echo your new brand behaviour; that includes customer communications (telephone, email, face to face for example), your website image, your stationery, documentation and more.

5. Don’t re brand without good reason if your current image does actually match your brand behaviour. If your logo design and imagery just looks a bit dated and tired compared to your competitors…you don’t need to change the entire image, simply refresh it without alienating your customer base with a completely new brand image that doesn’t have the same brand equity the old one has. A few small tweaks can make all the difference.

Out of Interest
Even some of the big brands have struggled with re branding, much to the delight of the media, some examples include;

Post Office (attempted to change to ‘Consignia’)
British Airways (removed Union Jack from it’s tail fins and suffered brand attacks from Virgin)
Coca Cola (In 1985 tried to launch ‘New Coke’, it was a total failure and they had to change it to ‘Classic Coke’)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.