Refresh or Rebrand? Three Key Concepts

Your brand is the composite of emotions, attitudes and ideas that customers share about your business.

To put it more simply: your brand isn’t what you say you are, but what they say you are. Sometimes our clients are running good businesses, but because the market moves at the speed of Apple, Google and Facebook, it’s harder to find new customers and get them to share their positive experiences.

This is the situation we encounter with the vast majority of our clients. One of the first things we have to determine is whether to tweak the client’s existing brand by updating assets, or completely overhaul their approach to the market and set them on a newer, more profitable course.

Here are three key points to help you determine if a rebrand or a refresh is right for your business:

Know what your brand isn’t.

A brand is more than a logo or a tagline or any of its aesthetic assets. A slick new logo won’t move the needle for your business if the fundamental focus of your business doesn’t resonate with customer needs. Likewise, if your business is doing everything right by its customers but they can’t share your brand assets on Social Media, then you’re missing an opportunity.

Evaluate your brand promise.

Marketing guru Seth Godin once said it doesn’t matter if you build a better mousetrap if your customers don’t have a mouse problem. This is an easy way to understand product-market fit, the alignment between what your business sells and what customers want to buy.

We encourage our clients to think about product-market fit by thinking of their brand/advertising as a promise to solve a problem their customers have presented. By aligning your customer needs with the promises your business makes (and keeps!), we’ll better understand if your brand needs a little tweak or a bold new trajectory.

Identify your unfair advantage.

Do you serve the best hamburgers in Chattanooga? Are you the only lawyer in the region qualified to review intellectual property contracts? Identifying your “best” and “only” helps focus your brand’s assets around your strongest competitive position.