A guide to your complete brand refresh for 2024

Guest post by 10x digital, a holistic digital marketing agency focused on data-driven results, offering comprehensive services and innovative strategies. 

Refreshing your existing brand, whether in entirety or simply creating the next evolution, isn’t just a luxury: it’s a must. Over the past year, we’ve seen the needs, behaviours, and profiles of our consumer audiences change, and it’s our job as marketers to pivot our brand experience to that shift. Your brand equity is dependent upon meeting the needs of your consumer audiences. 

The process of refreshing your brand doesn’t need to be a complete overhaul but rather an analysis of your brand’s current performance. Start by bringing these two key questions to the table:

• Does our brand convey our company’s vision, key messaging, and solutions?
• Does our brand resonate with our intended target audience, or is it missing the mark?

Based on your team’s responses and audience research, you’ll be able to build a tactical pathway. Try the following small, intentional pivots to enhance your brand and expand its applications.

Why the visual identity of your brand matters. 

The first step is understanding the importance of your brand. Your brand image is more than an aesthetic or pretty design; it’s what forms your audience’s first impression of your organisation. When done correctly, your brand becomes a complex ecosystem that can involve values, tone, logo, icons, imagery, themes, movement, and visual representations.

Simply put, brand image is how you build recognition, credibility, and equity in your market. ..>target personas, influential brands (shining star examples in your industry), and emotions you want to evoke with your brand. Develop your visual brand guide to include fonts (their uses and colours), patterns, photography style, etc. 

• Collaborate with designers to understand your design style. How you share your brand can range from a classic style to minimalist to even modern or retro. Your design style significantly impacts how you and your offering are viewed, so select a style that resonates with your vision and intended audience. An example of a strong design shift comes from the recently rebranded Guinness, taking a traditional logo (200 years old) and shifting to a modern/minimal look without losing their core message or elements.
• Test your brand everywhere, and get feedback. Does your brand extend from web design to print material, social media, and merchandise? Testing your brands in every corner it might reach is key to understanding the flexibility of what you’ve created. Ask for feedback from peers, consumers, and trusted advisors to get a 360-degree review of your work.

Who’s perfected the brand refresh?

Need to source a little inspiration to get started? Here are some of the brands that have been through impressive rebrands that paid off for their consumer base:

• Taco Bell: For the popular fast-food brand, authenticity was a key element of their re-brand. “We have always been known as an innovative brand from the food perspective, but now we’re carrying that through with our design and introducing the brand as a lifestyle brand and not just a fast-food restaurant,” says Deborah Brand, VP of Development and Design for Taco Bell. 
GoDaddy: During a significant rebranding process, the internet domain registration company introduced a new visual design to align with its vision to connect with the entrepreneurs that fuel their business. Leaning into the “Go” from their name, Cameron Scott, GoDaddy’s chief brand officer, shared that their “customers are looking for somebody to always have their back and it’s important for us to have a mark that represents that for them.” The subtle alterations in visual elements added to their brand equity.Trip Advisor: Another testament to the power of simplicity, Trip Advisor went through a rebrand to create a more seamless application across their digital presence. “Our brief was to prepare the brand for the next 20 years by refining its most distinctive assets and introducing new ones, which would create a more cohesive visual identity,” shared Mark Sloan, head of design. “By allowing the logo to live in one colour and reproduce well at all sizes, we’ve made it more flexible and less susceptible to misuse in the marketplace.”

Build a brand that works for you.

At the end of the day, you need to treat your brand like a member of your team: set benchmarks for its success against business objectives and help it evolve over time to meet your audience’s needs. Depending on the size and capacity of your organisation, consider outsourcing your rebranding campaign. Working with a digital marketing agency with branding expertise will give you access to an army of specialists (i.e., designers to create, PR team to promote, developers to execute new web presence).

You only get one impression with consumers, so let’s get it right.