Rebranding. It’s a big, scary idea that conjures up memories of companies simplifying, becoming weirdly minimal and losing their personality and charm. But that’s not what it has to be. A rebrand can shock new life into your business, realign your visuals with your values and kickstart a whole new chapter in your working world. But how do you know when the time is right?
1. Ad-Hoc, Inconsistent Branding
It’s a tale I’ve heard time and time again. A small business started with basically no budget, no graphic design training and a great idea. And because they don’t know the in’s and out’s of branding, or how important it can be, they’ll throw a logo together in Canva, or get their neice who’s an artist to put one together, and it’ll do fine for the first couple of years.
Because all they have is a logo, and perhaps a single colour, it becomes quite tricky when the business expands. Usually the expansions are all sort of tacked on to the original brand in a very ad-hoc way, resulting in a very mish-mash, slapdash result. From the inside, it’s just “making something for socials to announce a new project”, but from the outside, its very hard to know that these projects all operate under the same business, because there’s no link in all of the branding. There are businesses out there doing incredible things for their communities, but because nobody in the community can tell it’s them doing each and every one, they have to work ten times harder to establish a presence and become a known name, because they’re working from zero every time instead of building from the trust and goodwill established by the other areas of their work.
2. It Doesn’t Fit your Target Market
When was the last time you actually sat down and thought about who your target market is? Their wants, their needs, and other brands they gravitate towards? Tastes change over time, and what might have been an incredible brand for the audience at the time of it’s inception may have, over time, become slightly irrelevant. But how do you know if this has happened, and what do you do if it has?
Well, the most obvious signs are a slowing of growth. Dwindling interactions on your social media posts despite not changing your strategy at all, might indicate that your branding isn’t attracting the same attention that it used to. This can be with both your current customer base, or your inability to attract new ones.
Don’t worry, it’s not a bad thing at all to have branding slip out of relevance or mismatch with your target audience. That’s just natural. What’s a bad thing is not acting on it. The easiest way to act on it would be to do some market research. Ask people in your target audience about your branding, seek out what companies with similar target audiences are doing, and perhaps consult a designer who has worked in a similar target demographic before to help you. If you can adjust your flight path to one more in line with finding your audience, all is not lost.
3. You’re Blending in Too Much
In the previous section, I talked about looking at what your competition is doing to better match your target market. But I want to warn you away from doing that TOO much.
I recall speaking with a vetinary supply company who had just rebranded, and decided to buck the trend in regards to colour schemes. And at the next expo, they were the one orange booth in a sea of Blues and Greens. As a result, they got far more attention and in turn, far more sales. There is something to be said for Zagging when your competition is all Zigging, so long as you don’t go TOO far in the opposite direction that you lose your target demo. If you blend in too much, you suffer, well, getting lost in the crowd. If your competition doesn’t know your product against your competitors at arms length, how are they supposed to become loyal customers?
To test this, find your competition’s logos, and make a document of all of them, and yours, at the same size. Test how long it takes people to find yours in the crowd. Any more than a few seconds and you may be blending it too much.
The View From The Outside
When I find these businesses, with their suite of disconnected brands and sub-brands, their mismatched identities or their bland, uninspired look, very rarely do they consider themselves in need of a rebrand. Because they’ve been on the inside of it for so long, they’ve lost sight of the audience perception. From the inside, they know the decision making process that went into every concession, every mismatch, every “it’ll have to do”. But the audience doesn’t know any of that logic, all they see is the final product.
If this sounds like you, if a word of this has struck you and now you’re considering a rebrand, get in touch with me at edenmw.com, book in your free Branding Consultancy Session and let’s see if we can make magic together
