If your brand is starting to look a little (or a hell of a lot) worse for wear, it might be time to give it an upgrade. But this begs the question, realign or refresh?
The marketing landscape is filled with ‘re’ buzzwords designed to make you feel like your marketing needs to be updated. Agencies say you need to reset, reactivate, rejuvenate, restyle, remodel, revamp, refurbish, and regenerate your brand in order to effectively chase leads, get traffic, or increase sales. While we try to steer clear of jargon in the studio, sometimes your brand might be looking a little rough around the edges. But as far as we’re concerned, there are only two ‘re’s you need to consider: realign or refresh.
When we tackle our famous (at least in our eyes) ‘Identity first, marketing second’ approach to a new or established client – we often pinpoint one of these two approaches to enhance their brand and hurtle them towards their goals. But which one is right for you? Let us break it down for you.
Brand realignment (or, fine tuning your existing assets)
At its core a brand realignment is about working with your existing brand to tighten and refine the elements you already have. For us, this usually means working with your pre-existing logo and basic elements, but finding ways to really make the brand feel more cohesive. While this really depends on the client, this could mean reducing the amount of marketing options you currently have on offer, introducing a new colour into the palette, or even refining your messaging.
There is really no cookie-cutter approach to a realignment. It entirely depends on what your brand looks like, how effective it currently is (or isn’t) and what direction your business is heading in. At the end of the day, we try to keep as many original assets as possible from your brand. The goal is to enhance the brand experience, not confuse your customers.
Brand refresh (or, updating your assets)
If your brand needs more than just a tune up, it might be time to refresh. While a brand refresh is a bit more extensive than a realignment, the goal is not to give you a completely new brand – but rather rework your existing assets to better work with the current industry, your target audience, and future business endeavours. This could mean a variety of different changes depending on your brand’s circumstances, from updating your logo, to modernising the colour palette. Really, the goal here is make sure your brand keeps evolving with your audience.
The key to a good refresh is making sure at the end of the process, the brand is still instantly recognisable as yours. We want your customers to stop and say ‘wow, they’ve updated’ not ‘wow, who is this?’. We usually pair a refresh with a launch campaign, where our team works with you to roll out the brand across physical and print marketing channels.
All in all, there is no singular approach for everybody. If you’re ready for a change but unsure of where to start – we’re your first port of call.