When it is time to refresh your brand identity.
Many corporate brands require redesign due to many reasons including change of direction, name change, time in business, product changes and administrative reasons. Deciding when to change existing brand identity and when to venture into redesign is important. Quite often marketing team develops elaborate transition strategy and decide to implement change of branding slowly and strategically.
To help identify when your old brand will no longer support updated business initiatives use the following basic questions:
- Does my current brand carry attributes to support current lineup of products?
- Is current messaging still supported by the brand identity?
- Do you use visual icon to represent your brand? If so, is it flexible enough to be used in different color?
- What configuration is your logo – vertical or horizontal? Often older organizational seals and very inflexible and require rework
- Do you have sub brands developed on the old branding? Often parallel branding deviates from older brand and serves as starting point to launch overhaul of the entire organizational branding. Very often sub brands have developed over time, loosing connection to primary brand
- Analyze historic usage of the logo. Determine if color combination used in the identity still appropriate for latest messaging and product line-up
- Check competitive branding, put all logos on the paper and analyze if your branding stands out as outdated
- Check font usage. Many older fonts have been overused over many years and influence overall logo and identity perception.
When finally ready, do not attempt to gather different ideas by contacting crowd sourcing resources. Re-branding a company takes expertise and understanding product, organizational history not just pretty picture. Contact professional design organization with expertise and experience working with branding.
