Getting your brand going can be likened to joining a gym in January as part of your New Year's resolution to get fit. At first, you're inspired to go regularly. You might even start to notice a difference and feel happier about your fitness. Then February comes along, bringing other activities and distractions. Exercising falls to the wayside and all that hard work you put in at the beginning is almost redundant.
Your brand identity is like your fitness. You need to attend to it diligently and regularly in order to continue enjoying the benefits. Otherwise, the branding work you did and decisions you made when your business started up will quickly lose impact.
And just as a good relationship with fitness can bring a multitude of immediate and long-term benefits, so can a good relationship with brand identity. For example, it can have a positive impact across your business, be that through profit, boosting recognisability, attracting investment or aiding with international development. Tracking and comparing performance is an effective way to monitor the value added by investing in good branding.
Regularly attending to your brand is like doing a 20-minute workout every day. It doesn't take much time or effort, and when it comes to making a big change—a rebrand, for example—it will be much easier, just as running a marathon is easier if you are already in shape and have a good exercise routine.
So, in keeping with the fitness theme, here are some branding "20-minute workouts" you can use in your business:
- Ensure all employees understand your brand values, which should be clear and well-documented
- Ensure all employees regularly use and refer to your brand guidelines, both in their work and as representatives of the business
- Ensure your brand values are prevalent across all areas of your business and the content you create
Remember, when your team understands your brand's principles and values, they are enabled to share them with customers, creating a solid foundation for growth.
If I'm doing my "20-minute workouts" and my brand is well-recognised and trusted, why would I need to refresh my brand?
There's any number of factors that might prompt a refresh or a rebrand. You might have recently restructured the business, or launched a new offering that needs to be reflected brand-wide. You might feel your brand has become tired or outdated, or perhaps you need to connect with a shifting demographic. Or maybe your rebrand is a response to external influences, eg. environmental, financial, political or social changes.
An excellent example of this is Pfizer's 2021 logo redesign. The pharmaceutical company became a household name with their vaccine against the COVID-19 virus. Not long after, they changed their logo from a pill to a helix to demonstrate their new position as a company that no longer simply treats diseases, but also cures and prevents them.
The key is to regularly assess your brand's relevance and success. When you do this, it will be easier to identify when you need to adapt your strategy and brand in order to continue having an impact.
Won't refreshing my brand damage its integrity or recognisability?
Changing your brand for the sake of changing, without being grounded by a purpose, may lead to such challenges later on. This is why a rebrand or refresh should be connected to a strategy or triggered by an event that has significant impact on your offering and the way your business exists.
In fact, rather than damaging your integrity and recognisability, sometimes a big change is exactly the boost your brand needs, as long as it's connected to strategy and a mission. Let's take a look at Instagram's 2016 rebrand and the long-term impact it has had.
Only six years after its launch, Instagram had a rebrand so drastic that, after the update, many users didn't recognise the app icon. Where had the iconic polaroid camera gone? What was the deal with the new minimalist logo? And why did the app icon look like a rainbow? The answers to these questions can be found by examining why they rebranded in the first place.
Essentially, the old branding was perfect for what Instagram had been. But they were developing into something new, no longer just a photo-sharing service, and their branding needed to reflect this. They recognised amongst their users a desire for greater focus on content creation, including video, and a need for a more intuitive interface with better integration of sub-brands like Layout and Boomerang. Their new look and feel opened up the brand's scope to encompass all of the platform's new elements. Although it was a controversial change, it made sense within their new strategy.
This was back when Instagram had over 400 million monthly active users. Now, they have over 2.4 billion and counting.
Don't get left behind
Businesses, customers, and markets are in constant flux. Monitoring these changes and being willing to adapt will help to keep your brand relevant. The moral of the story here—stop thinking of branding as something that can be "completed". Dynamic and flexible? Now, that's good branding!
