Rebranding and refreshing a brand is the strategic process of changing how a brand is perceived by its audience. It involves redefining a company’s identity, positioning, and communication in order to better align with business goals, market conditions, or customer expectations.
How Rebranding and Brand Refresh Work
Rebranding is a marketing strategy that aims to develop a new, differentiated brand identity. Rebranding seeks to change how the brand is perceived by consumers, competitors, investors, stakeholders, and employees.
Rebranding can affect many brand elements, like a company’s name, logo, visual identity, tone of voice, messaging, products, and even internal culture. While rebranding is typically associated with visual changes, the core of rebranding is strategic, not cosmetic. For example, a logo change without a shift in positioning or value proposition is not a true rebrand.
Brand Refresh Like all branding practices, rebranding depends heavily on an organization’s target audience. In practice, brand refresh is used to correct misalignment between what a company is and how it is perceived.
Why companies rebrand
The reasons for rebranding are usually driven by structural changes or strategic shifts. In most cases, companies rebrand because their existing brand no longer reflects their strategic reality. These are seven of the most common motivations for rebranding:
Strategic growth is one of the primary reasons companies rebrand. As organizations scale, their original brand may no longer reflect their size, ambition, or scope of operations.
Rebranding for strategic growth often occurs when a company:
These situations usually require a new brand identity to reflect the updated business structure, and in these situations, rebranding helps communicate maturity, credibility, and long-term vision. In cases of globalization, rebranding should take localization into account to make sure the brand identity resonates with all customers regardless of country of origin.
Some rebranding happens because a company’s core focus changes. This may involve adopting a new business model, shifting priorities, or redefining mission and values.
Examples of changing focus include:
Rebranding due to a new focus makes sure that the brand reflects what the company actually does now, not what it did in the past. This type of rebranding should include a careful review of the brand purpose statement to make sure it captures the brand’s new focus.
Targeting new audiences is a common reason for rebranding, especially when the existing brand identity does not resonate with the desired market.
This type of rebranding is often used to:
Rebranding in this context helps align the brand’s image with the new audience. This type of rebranding focuses heavily on messaging, tone of voice, brand personality, and cultural relevance.
· Reaching new markets
In today’s increasingly globalized world, brands face the challenge of trying to appeal to a massive pool of people. As a result, companies expanding overseas often have to completely rebrand with the global market in mind or spin off a new brand specific to a region or audience.
· Appealing to new demographics
A consumer’s age plays a significant role in the aesthetics and messaging they prefer. For example, luxury brands attracting older populations may convey social status and class. But when they’re trying to reach consumers in their 30s, they may emphasize upscale adventure and independence.
· Aesthetic and color palette
Changes to visual elements like a brand’s overall color palette, font, and aesthetic are often part of rebranding campaigns and help to set the tone for new corporate values or to appeal to a different demographic.
Not all rebrands are so comprehensive. A brand refresh is a lighter identity update akin to a personal makeover instead of full-on plastic surgery. Often, the goal is to impact the way your company looks, sounds, or feels without making foundational changes.
A brand refresh usually involves changes to
A full rebrand, however, involves
Companies often do a brand refresh to stay current with the times or appeal to a new market or demographic, but choosing whether to do a brand refresh vs rebrand depends on your goal.
Takeaway: a brand refresh is the activity to change the identity of a company. There are many reasons to do this, including targeting new audiences and keeping up with the visual trend. Brand refresh should begin after conducting proper research on the market, and audience analysis cannot be conducted without setting clear goals. All the changes coming as part of the brand refresh should be done in a certain order. The audience should be notified properly via emails, social media posts, and ads.
