If you desire to comprehend the worth of brand updates, pull up some photos from your high school prom. Odds are that your style looks dated—and more importantly, it doesn’t feel like you anymore. Teal lamé was a solid selection once, but times have changed, and you’ve changed too.

Businesses, much like prom attendees, also evolve. The most successful companies regularly update their brands as they develop and mature—and as markets (or fashions) transformation. Many business leaders structure this procedure using something known as a brand refresh. Here’s what a brand refresh is and how it can assist your business remain current and competitive.

What is a brand refresh?

A brand refresh is an update to one or more elements of a business’s brand identity. It’s a strategic way designed to align a business’s brand image with its current offerings and reflect its response to shifting economy conditions and customer needs.

Brand refreshes can involve adjustments to a business’s messaging, design structure, or other brand elements. Here’s an overview of the elements you might consider revising:

• Visual identity structure. A visual identity structure encompasses all of a brand’s visual assets and graphic design elements, including its color palette, logo, typography, and photo style.

• Brand messaging. Brand messaging includes a business’sbrand narrative, brand values, and worth propositions.

• Brand personality. Companies can also make adjustments to their brand voice, tone, and image style, all of which affect their brand personalities.

• Brand architecture. Brand architecture refers to how a business structures its brands, such as whether it develops brands based on person products or unifies all its service and product offerings under one umbrella brand.

Brand refresh vs. rebrand

A brand refresh updates, tweaks, or modernizes a brand’s identity. A rebrand, on the other hand, is a complete overhaul of a brand identity. If a brand refresh is like redecorating your living room—maybe switching up the window treatments, trying a recent paint color, or swapping out your framed Chicago Cubs jersey for a vintage oil painting—then rebranding involves taking the room down to the studs (or even knocking down your entire house).

Although companies use brand refreshes to keep their images current, businesses typically undertake a complete rebrand because of a failed brand schedule or a fundamental transformation to a business’s mission or strategy document, such as recent ownership, a combination, or entry into a recent economy.

Benefits of a brand refresh

• Improved brand positioning
• Access to recent spectators segments
• Competitive edge
• Consistent brand identity

A successful brand refresh can assist your business connect with customers and remain competitive in dynamic markets. Here’s an overview of the benefits:

Improved brand positioning

Brand refreshes can assist you maintain powerful brand positioning, letting your business respond to emerging customer needs. You can also use a refresh to boost differentiation by developing a more distinctive visual identity. A financial services firm, for example, that uses a shade of navy similar to its four main competitors might rework its logo in cerulean or aquamarine.

Access to recent spectators segments

A strategic brand refresh can also assist you target recent potential customer groups. If you desire to boost brand awareness among parents, for example, you might revise your brand messaging, visual identity, and voice to address the specific needs and selection drivers of this spectators segment.

Competitive edge

customer needs constantly transformation. Successful refreshes respond to those shifts, providing a competitive advantage that helps your business remain relevant as spectators needs evolve. Brand refreshes can also receive into account contemporary aesthetic norms, ensuring that a business’s visual identity feels current. This might involve swapping out older typeface with a more modern one.

Consistent brand identity

Although a brand refresh can update one or more core elements of your business’s brand identity, the complete outcome is an updated version of the same brand—not a recent brand. Your business continues to advantage from existing brand loyalty while you focus on marketing strategies that back immediate business goals rather than introducing a recent brand.

Brand refreshes also let you retain significant factors of brand identity—such as a signature wit or shade of green—providing a familiar touchpoint for your faithful consumers.

How to conduct an effective brand refresh

1. Identify your goals
2. Revisit your economy research
3. Rework your brand messaging and positioning
4. Update your visual elements
5. Structure your revision procedure
6. schedule your rollout

The packed brand refresh procedure starts with objective-setting and ends with a successful rollout of your updated brand. Here are six steps to assist refresh your brand:

1. Identify your goals

commence by identifying the goals of your brand refresh assignment. This can assist you confirm that you require one and navigator your brand refresh strategyas you proceed.

For example, a business might set a objective of increasing online engagement and yield among a particular spectators segment, such as younger or female-identifying consumers.

2. Revisit your economy research

A brand refresh requires a obvious understanding of your customers, so revisit your customer and economy research to ensure that your information is up to date. Pay special attention to any changes in your target spectators demographics or needs since your last research round—this information can assist you determine what changes to make to your brand identity.

You can also conduct a recent competitor analysis (or competitive analysis) to view how your competitors’ branding and brand positioning have evolved.

3. Rework your brand messaging and positioning

Consider how your current brand positioning and messaging align with your refresh goals, and revise your key messages according to your updated customer and economy research.

For example, imagine your business sells ready-to-blend smoothies, and your messaging emphasizes the period-saving benefits of your products. You desire to appeal to younger consumers, and economy research tells you this throng is less motivated by messages about efficiency than by claims about a product’s health and wellness benefits. You might reposition your business as a wellness brand, emphasizing your product’s personal fitness, gut health, and immune structure benefits.

4. Update your visual elements

Next, revisit the visual elements of your brand identity structure—including your brand’s logo, color palette, and typeface—and consult your goals and economy research to identify productive changes. You can also contrast your visual identity structure to your competitors’ and make updates if your structure doesn’t adequately differentiate your business.

5. Structure your revision procedure

Updating all your guarantee is a period-consuming procedure, but it’s critical for an effective refresh. commence by updating your brand guidelines to reflect any personality, messaging, or visual changes. obvious brand guidelines can assist you ensure consistency across materials and provide an straightforward point of reference for your internal throng during the refresh.

Next, perform a brand audit: receive stake of your current brand guarantee and document it in a spreadsheet or other tracking structure. Include brand assets, sales and marketing materials, and written content like email and web copy. You can use this list to schedule your revisions, track your advancement, and ensure you don’t overlook any updates.

6. schedule your rollout

Once you’ve audited your brand, identify critical assets to update before launch. You might rework web copy to reflect your recent tone correct away, for example, but hold off on updating seasonal marketing materials until your refresh is live.

Many companies commence with a soft launch that loops in internal stakeholders and a few key external stakeholders before a more formal launch. This way can assist you identify and fix issues with your updated brand before you draft a press release and publicly promote your refresh.

Successful brand refresh example

trip luggage and accessory retailer Eagle Creek recently updated its brand to highlight its distinctive position in the outdoor and expedition economy. The refresh was partially inspired by a transformation in ownership. Apparel maker VF Corp., which acquired Eagle Creek in 2007, said in June 2021 it planned to retire the brand. Former VF employee Travis Campbell bought the business a few months later.

Lisa Bressler, Eagle Creek’s vice president of marketing and ecommerce, says the business’s history informed its brand refresh schedule.

“We picked up this brand that’s almost 50 years ancient and had already gone through a couple of significant shifts in the way that it showed up to the globe,” Lisa says. “The number-one thing that we wanted to do was to really receive our period and evolve the brand in a very leisurely, palatable, non-alienating way. We wanted to pull the best parts of our history forward into the narrative that we desire to inform today.”

The Eagle Creek throng started the refresh procedure by re-examining its brand values.

“We were like, ‘What do we worry about as a throng of people who are working with this brand? What does this brand stand for?’” Lisa says. “It came to this concept that trip can and should be a force for excellent, and the products that we make should perform and be best in class.”

Lisa says these values are a key differentiator for Eagle Creek, and the business’s next step was updating its brand messaging to highlight them.

“We wanted to receive our brand look and feel from very commercial and very product-concentrated to more of a storytelling arc,” she says. “We are the leading manufacturer of trip goods. We’ve been around the longest. We invented many trip product categories. And we wanted to commence really telling that narrative through the lens of actual users, customers, photographer friends—anybody going on large adventures.”

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Eagle Creek first updated the content elements of its brand refresh schedule to reflect this recent messaging, with more revisions in the works.

“We, as a brand, depend that the power of trip is powerful and excellent, and that building connections with people outside your throng, country, state—whatever it may be—is inherently excellent for the globe,” she says.