When a business tells me they’re ready for a rebrand or refresh, design is rarely the first thing I talk about.
In my experience rebrands are almost always triggered by something else in the business and that can be a multitude of influences. Sometimes your market has got tight, growth has slowed, sales feel harder than they should. Sometimes the business has evolved with new ideas, new leadership or new ambition. Maybe attracting the right talent has become harder, and maybe the current look and feel of the business is just tired. All good starting points to assess your brand and your marketing strategies as they are both key pieces to commercial and operational success.
As a business owner, I understand the instinct to focus on what’s visible, hence the request is often a new logo and a fresh website. It feels like you’re doing something and moving things forward, but they often just add to the noise. Some businesses seem to have a new look every other social post or sales brochure just to follow the latest trend.
But if it looks designed and it’s consistent surely that’s ok then!
Well, great design and consistency are both important but these are simply decoration if there’s nothing really underpinning the thinking. We’ve all seen nicely designed “stuff” but remember that brand influences your purchasing decisions more than we’d all like to admit.
So design is an expression of the brand, not the starting point.
Before you think about the visual side it’s important to take a look at the business itself. You may have a clear business strategy, sometimes even that’s a work in progress and that’s ok. Either way, before any design starts you should unpack everything from the commercials to the product or service you offer and why it’s important to your customers. Consider them and your other audiences, and this includes your team, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. How do you want them to feel about your business? If they were talking about your business, what would you want them to say? Now take a deeper dive into your competition, looking at how they present themselves, how they speak, what they’re saying!
Exploring all of this genuinely helps you uncover opportunities. It tells you whether branding is actually the challenge and how much you should even worry about it, or whether it’s simply some cracks in your marketing, or it’s both. It helps identify genuine differentiation and avoids you just copycatting everyone else in your industry.
Branding is not just making things look good, although it definitely should, if approached correctly it will positively impact your business, your sales and your bottom line. It’s not just an intangible nice to have. Whether it’s a full rebrand or just a refresh of the brand look, strong results come from going back a few steps. That deeper thinking is where the opportunity to reposition the business stands out with real clarity and impacts business!
Great creative matters. It simply works best when it is built on something solid.