Reworking or refreshing your brand helps maintain a clean, contemporary look and brand identity. It can be challenging, however, to know what to rework and keep a consistent look over time.
After all, refreshing your brand isn’t the same as starting from scratch. Your company undoubtedly has cultivated an audience that you want to hold onto through your brand refresh. In order to maintain the most effective components of your brand, follow the following 6 branding checklist steps.
- Understand why you want to revamp your brand
- Evaluate the competitive landscape
- Select brand attributes to highlight
- Build brand materials that represent your business
- Implement your materials into your current operations
- Gather feedback on your improved materials
Why Revamp Your Brand?
Before diving into the details of your brand refresh, it’s a good idea to define why you want to make changes to your brand in the first place. Determining this at the beginning of your journey will help guide you to make the best, most strategic decisions throughout the process.
Common reasons companies choose to update their brand include:
- The look and feel of your brand is outdated
- Your brand is no longer representative of your services
- Your company has acquired other businesses and wants to incorporate them into a brand
- You want to appeal to a different target audience with your branding materials
There are plenty of reasons that a company may desire new branding components. Brainstorming why you’re doing a brand update will confirm your need for a professional branding company and aid your company in finding the best branding solutions for your situation.
2. Evaluate The Competitive Landscape
Once you know what you want out of a branding update for your company, it’s time to evaluate where your brand stands in the marketplace. Examining the competitive landscape will help you get a feel for specific branding trends in the market.
It is essential to check the branding materials of competitors to further guide your decision-making for your own branding journey. This doesn’t mean that you must assimilate your brand to whichever trends you find most prevalent. You should take this opportunity to think about what might make you stand out against what already exists in the marketplace.
3. Select Attributes To Highlight
Now that you’ve seen competitor branding assets, you may have some early ideas about how you may differentiate your business through your new branding updates.
Your current company has likely already developed unique brand characteristics that you bolster with your mission statement and values. Brand characteristics will serve as the basis for your brand identity and personality.
Consider your current industry and company. Depending on your target market, you may want to highlight any of the following brand characteristics in your branding materials:
- Compassion
- Fairness
- Confidence
- Honesty
- Humor
- Passion
- Progressiveness
- Nonconformity
- Strength
- Purity
These characteristics are particularly important because they set the tone for your business and form customer expectations before consumers even interact with your staff. Conveying a desirable brand characteristic through your branding will allow prospective customers to build comfort in their early interactions with your company.
Thinking through potential differentiating brand characteristics will help your company embrace its ideal personality through the brand development and update process.
3. Create Identifying Brand Materials
At this point in the branding checklist, you’ve laid the groundwork for new brand materials. You’ve considered competitor identities, evaluated your positioning, and come to an understanding of how to stand out in the market. Now that this planning is in place, you can partner with a design firm to create new brand materials.
Logo
Logos are a core part of your company’s brand identity. Many consumers can recognize popular companies through their logos alone.
For this reason, updating your company logo can be tricky. You want to make a clean, modern final product while still being recognizable to loyal customers.
Large companies strike this balance by maintaining core shapes, lines, and colors in their logo updates.
Source: DreamBig Creative
For instance, Domino’s Pizza may have changed the shape of its logo, but they ensured that the colors and general patterns stayed consistent.
Font
Branded fonts and typography is another crucial way that consumers identify brands.
If you’re planning to upgrade other aspects of your company’s brand, keeping fonts consistent is a great way to make your new brand look like a natural progression from the old one.
Many large companies use creative typography within their logos as well.
Source: The Logo Creative
Slight changes can be made to fonts over time to ensure that your style remains modern and appealing. For example, you may choose to lessen the severity of italics or reduce boldness on text for a lighter feel.
Color Palette
Brand colors can have a significant impact on how audiences perceive the values and attributes of your company. Choosing effective colors in a rebranding effort could boost your brand reputation.
For instance, the color blue has become associated with stability and trust. This is why large-scale technology brands tend to lean on various shades of the color in their branding. For example, PayPal, Facebook, and Twitter all employ blue color palettes.
Source: Venngage
Color is powerful. Remember that a drastic change in color palette may confuse already loyal customers. Discuss opportunities to shift colors with a trusted branding partner before adjusting your primary identifying colors.
4. Brand Guidelines
Once you’ve determined each visual element of your new brand, it’s time to centralize your new brand standards in one place. Most companies call this file their brand guidelines.
Brand guidelines combine chosen colors, fonts, logos, and any other critical visual components in one space. This functions as a playbook for employees as they leverage your brand to create connections with customers.
For instance, in Uber’s brand guidelines, it’s easy to find key brand colors, app icon design, and several graphic design elements that the company uses in its day-to-day operations.
Source: Wolff Olins
Brand guidelines offer easy access to all of your branded materials, keeping your branding consistent over time.
5. Apply New Brand Identity To Websites & Apps
After producing new branding elements, you can begin adjusting your current products to reflect your updated look.
Companies should first turn to their digital presence to communicate and showcase updates. They can use their websites, apps, or social media accounts to get the word out to current and prospective customers.
Your company can implement changes quickly and easily with the help of a development partner or in-house team.
6. Gather Branding Feedback
In any project, feedback is precious. You should seek both qualitative and quantitative feedback from customers and those outside your organization to determine the quality of your brand updates.
It’s easy to get lost in brand building and form biased opinions about the project’s results. Feedback will help you determine whether your new branding materials effectively solve the problem you set out to solve.
Branding Checklists Will Keep Your Strategy Focused
Creating a branding checklist of your own will help keep your operations consistent over time. You many want to evolve your checklist to fit your unique needs but the following elements should serve as a jumping off point:
- Understand why you want to revamp your brand
- Evaluate the competitive landscape
- Select brand attributes to highlight
- Build brand materials that represent your business
- Implement your materials into your current operations
- Gather feedback on your improved materials
Using this branding checklist as a foundation will keep your strategy in line with your branding vision.