Is it time to refresh your brand?

Posted by truecourse

JOIN US DECEMBER 1 (12PM) AT HUB350 FOR OUR LUNCH+LEARN ON THIS TOPIC.

First off, what IS your brand? It’s about so much more than your logo. Your brand conveys to your current and prospective customers, talent, and partners:

what you do
who you are
and, especially important in a B2B context (where the business relationship is so important), why you’re the right fit for them

Audiences experience your brand every time they interact with your company, starting with your marketing.

Question: Does your marketing work hard enough to properly convey your brand? Because that’s where your marketing ROI starts.

1. How do you know it’s time for a brand refresh?

If your company hasn’t updated its branding in the last five years, it might be time for a refresh.

When you don’t need to change the core elements of your brand, like your company name, a refresh is your ideal option. It keeps your brand current and aligned with what your target audiences are looking for. The process isn’t as involved as creating a brand from scratch; instead it focuses on ensuring your brand reflects the evolution and growth of your company, while maintaining just enough consistency with the past to remind your audiences of the quality and reliability they’ve come to expect.

Here are some clues a brand refresh is in order:

Do your logo and colours feel a bit dated?
Is your company offering new products or services?
Has your market position changed—perhaps through new competitors, new technologies, or other changes?
Does your messaging accurately describe your offerings, value proposition, and speak to your ideal client?
Does it match your company’s maturity, and size?

Not sure? Sometimes a brand audit is the best way to make a proper determination—and provide an official report for management to make the final decision. Ask us for details.

2. What’s the first step to a successful refresh?

We always start a brand refresh engagement with discovery and our brand strategy and recommendations.

It’s essential that all company decision makers join us at the strategy table. Your brand is business critical. Having senior management and the CEO participate from the outset keeps the process efficient and prevents expensive delays and changes later on.

We understand how valuable your time is, and that you have many business-critical issues competing for your attention. That is why we have developed a guided process that enables us to collect—in as few as 3 meetings—the key strategic information we need to do our work, simply through conversations with your team. We then synthesize this information and present you with our brand strategy document, which includes:

Business objectives
Overview of products and services (current and future plans)
Target audiences
Competitors
Value proposition
Key differentiators
Core corporate values
Brand attributes
Recommendations for the new, refreshed brand experience
And more…

Once you’ve approved it, the brand strategy document is not only the foundation for the creative work we’ll do, it’s also an excellent document for you to share with your employees to help ensure strategic alignment across the organization.

Get in touch to learn more and get started.

3. What’s the rest of the process?

After Discovery, the rest is easy on your end.

Our strategy team brings in our creative team—we share the brand strategy and recommendations, provide creative direction, and then leave our expert designers to work their magic. We’ll present you with a few options to choose from (logos, colours, look & feel, messaging, etc.) before rolling out the full brand refresh. The updated brand will need to be applied to all your market-facing marketing:

Website
Corporate stationery and reports
Social media platforms
Trade show booths and banners
Vehicles
All other marketing materials…

What about timing? Some clients will be ready to roll out their updated brand all at once, while others need to plan to roll it out over a few months. We’ll work with you to prioritize the most important items that will drive the business result you need from your brand refresh.

4. What are the results?

It’s important that your audiences quickly recognize that you’ve refreshed your brand (that’s where the ROI starts).

This means showcasing your updated branding where it will make an immediate impact. We recommend starting with your website, social media, and your team’s email signatures. These tactics are designed to draw a clear line in the sand between your previous and updated branding. Frequent and consistent posting on social media is an important part of the rollout as it ensures your audiences will see your updated branding often.

Our team will:

Plan and execute the launch of your brand refresh across multiple channels
Provide you with the updated design assets and marketing materials your team needs needs
Find new ways to leverage your assets for increased reach

…To ensure your brand refresh investment drives real results.

5. Takeaways

You work hard to grow your business.

When it’s time for a brand refresh, we have the expertise you need to:

Reflect the evolution of your company to align with your market positioning and ideal clients
Ensure your updated brand supports your business strategy
Plan the rollout to ensure your new message and look get noticed
Implement the rollout to maximize your ROI

Added bonus: The brand refresh process is good for your team as well. It has an energizing effect, renewing a sense of pride and purpose in the workplace.

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