Whether a business is updating a marketing strategy or simply trying to keep up with modern sentiment, sometimes a company needs to refresh its brand a little. But while change can be good, a business might not want to do a complete overhaul—especially if the organization lacks the resources to do so, or if its existing brand is well-established and popular.
As experienced agency leaders, the members of Forbes Agency Council know how to successfully brand and rebrand businesses. Below, they share 13 ways a company can refresh its image across platforms without risking its established brand equity.
1. Communicate Changes With Your Audience
The fear of rebranding whether large or small comes with the brand equity you’ve built with your audience. If you’re very active in communicating with your audience and customers on your journey, a small or large rebrand will not dissuade them in following your mission—they will stand excited and supportive. Your brand relationship with your audience and customer will allow changes to be made easily. – Tony Pec, Y Not You Media
2. Repackage Your Product, Service Or Knowledge
You can add a little sizzle to the agency in a number of ways. Create an information product that can be sold or given away online. Create a new software tool that supports your company and solves issues for your clients. Create and hold a live event. Write a book teaching things that you specialize in. Interview other specialists that benefit your clients in a podcast. – Breynan Hammons, Innvio
3. Find Ways To Connect To New Markets
As brands age, so does their target market. Brands find themselves stagnant because they have failed to remain relevant and evolve into new generations of consumers. Brands need to remember that equity is based on the perception of their target market. If a brand does a good job and understands and evolves with its consumers, it will remain relevant and “fresh” without the need to rebrand. – Revecka Jallad, DIVISA
4. Launch A New Campaign
Just like a beautifully executed haircut, you can easily give your branding a fresh look without making huge changes. We do this with new campaigns. There are a few ways to approach this, but right now, you should start with an idea that demonstrates your greatest values as an organization. Remember, public relations is about building relationships and creatively giving people things to share. – Jennifer von Stauffenberg, Olive Creative Strategies
5. Audit Your Existing Content To Enhance Your Brand Voice
A complete rebrand can be costly. Uplift your brand without the commitment of a complete overhaul by enhancing your brand’s voice. The key to success is a distinctive voice that is consistent in all aspects of your brand. This change will require an audit of your content and communications channels to ensure your new brand voice is positioned to connect with your external audiences. – Ana Miller, A2 Communications Group
6. Actively Engage In Conversation With Your Customer
If you want to raise brand equity without the risk of a rebrand, talk more. Actively engage in a two-sided public conversation with your customer. Social media has made this near-effortless. Extol your values, priorities, humor and brand by being an active member of the community you are trying to grow. You don’t always need a new logo; your customer needs to know you. – Kirk Westwood, Glass River Media
7. Rethink Your Content Strategy
An effective way to shift how your target audience views your brand is to re-tool your content strategy to focus on the intersection between your brand values and what’s important to the end-user. So consider re-aligning, re-interpreting and re-strategizing how your brand guidelines, personality and tone apply to your communication channels, including emails, blogs, social media, video and visuals. – Carey Kirkpatrick, CKP
8. Make Small Changes That Don’t Detract From Your Core Message
A little goes a long way. A facelift can be done by updating color scheme, images and messaging while still staying on brand so you don’t lose the core message or competency. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
9. Create Foundational Messaging And A Consistent Story
A brand needs a consistent story to feel cohesive and streamlined. It’s less challenging to introduce clear storytelling as a sort of refresh—identifying the concepts and stories that your brand stands for is a great way to create a sense of freshness while keeping the same style and brand aesthetic. – Lynne Golodner, Your People LLC
10. A/B Test Your New Messaging
We don’t know what we don’t know. Create your new message and A/B test. If it works, use it. Always study your data, as the story is in the data. I have seen many big agencies sabotage this by creating a “wow” factor for the client, but it fails miserably. – Qamar Zaman, KISSPR.COM
11. Aim To Better-Align Your Image With Core Brand Facets
Giving a brand a fresh new look doesn’t have to have anything to do with the core of what the brand is. The company’s vision, mission and values don’t change. In fact, any facelift should be done with the goal in mind to better align a brand’s image with these core facets. – Dmitrii Kustov, Regex SEO
12. Add A New Marketing Element Or Channel
When you feel that your brand could use some refreshing, try adding something new to your marketing. For example, if you only have corporate LinkedIn and Twitter, add Instagram and YouTube. Or slightly change the direction with your video content strategy by filming something you’ve never done before. Customers’ tastes are dynamic and unpredictable; just don’t be afraid to experiment. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
13. Keep It Simple
There are a lot of tactics a brand can implement without a full redesign. If brand equity exists, a brand can refresh by introducing secondary visual elements to their identity—complementary colors, new patterns or illustrations, updated photography styles, and so on. Even very minor adjustments such as correcting technical aspects of a symbol or word mark can give a brand the boost it needs. – Tripp Donnelly, REQ
