Using A Campaign To Refresh Your Brand
Your brand is tired. So tired. Often the knee jerk reaction, when a company has that realization, is to jump into a rebrand. And while many brands do require a rebrand to wake them up, I'd be willing to bet that more often than not you could add life to the brand with some outstanding campaign work. Silly thing for a branding agency to say? Nope. We do campaign work too because it's an essential tool in building brands. In fact, my contention is that campaign work is often a more effective and efficient way to move the needle and build a brand.
NEW OFFERINGS AND WHY THEY'RE SO DIFFERENT
The first step is to really dig into the sleepy brand and figure out what makes it different. We approach this in the same way we approach a rebrand. What's the audience? Has it changed? Does the brand appeal to the old audience or the new audience? What's the brand's offering? Has it changed? Does it appeal to the new audience?That's a lot of questions, but with questions come answers and the guidance from those answers should help define a strategy for the new campaign. Just like branding, it's all about telling your audience why the brand is so different. In a perfect world, there are some new offerings to tout. If not, then there's probably a new audience to introduce to the old offerings. Essentially that's the same thing, right?
DRESS UP THAT OLD LOGO WITH SOME NEW DESIGN ELEMENTS
I say it all the time. A logo is not your brand, it's just like the front door. And once you've got folks inside, you can really wow them with new brand elements.These design elements should be considered carefully, but there's a lot more opportunity to play and see what evokes the feelings you're looking for with your refreshed brand. And unless the logo is horrendous, it's surprising how additions to your color palette, photo style, font sets and the combination thereof can take what feels like an old brand and make it great again.
TAKE ON A NEW TONE
A number of brands have reinvented themselves with an injection of humor into their campaigns. And a number of brands have gone the other way as they attempt to appeal to a more serious demographic or elevate the perception of their brand. Especially in this content-driven era of marketing, the brand voice and the tone a brand takes can arguably have more of an effect on the brand than the visuals. Arguably. Maybe a combination of both? Seems like a good plan to me.So my recommendation, before you jump into a rebrand, is to consider whether you would be better served keeping some of the equity of your brand and instead using campaign work to freshen things up. If you go about it right, you'll learn a lot about your audience...and hey, you might not have to reprint your business cards.