The instinct to start again
When a business feels that its brand no longer fits, the natural response is to replace it: a new logo, a new website, perhaps a new name. It feels decisive, and it is easy to brief. The owners have looked at the current brand every day for years, and they are tired of it.
Clients have not looked at it every day. To them, the name, the colours and the familiar way the business presents itself are signals they use to recognise it. Replacing those signals without a reason asks clients to learn the business again.
What a rebuild can throw away
An established business has built more than its owners usually notice. The diagram on this page shows the main assets: its reputation with existing clients, recognition of its name and marks, the proof and content it has published, its visibility in search and its team’s habits. Each took years to build, and each can be damaged by a rebuild that does not set out to keep it.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research on distinctive brand assets treats elements that are both well known and unique to a brand as assets to use or lose. Large brands have learned this expensively. When Tropicana replaced its familiar packaging in 2009, unit sales fell 20 per cent within weeks and the original design returned. When Gap introduced a new logo in 2010, it reverted to the original within about a week.
What sharpening means
Sharpening keeps what works and changes what holds the business back. In practice, that usually means agreeing a clearer position, refining the identity rather than replacing it, rewriting the messages so they describe the business as it is today, and making every channel consistent. The name stays. The recognised elements stay, often redrawn so they work better. What changes is the clarity.
It is common for an established business to discover, once the position is clear, that most of its brand was sound. The problem was that it said too little, or said different things in different places.
When a rebuild is right
There are good reasons to start again. The business may have changed direction, merged, moved into very different markets or outgrown a name that now limits it. In those cases, the existing brand describes the wrong business, and sharpening it would only make the wrong message clearer. Even then, the best rebuilds carry forward whatever recognition they can.
Where to begin
Begin by finding out what clients recognise and value, and what is holding the business back. Those two lists are the brief. At Zelexis, every brand project starts this way, because the most valuable parts of an established brand are usually the ones it already has.
A useful next step
Something to try this week.
Make two lists. On the first, write everything about your current brand that clients mention, recognise or ask for by name. On the second, write what you believe is holding the business back. Anything on the first list should be kept and refined. The second list is the real brief.