Posted by: Jill Neumeister in Blog on Apr 06, 2010
Honor a brand's past while moving a business forward.
With good reason, a business owner or brand manager can be hesitant to change a logo, brandmark or the style of their marketing design. A smart business person knows that brands build strength through consistency and awareness because unlike popular belief, people like the familiar and the known.
Yet we have all seen businesses with "dated" looking graphics, marketing materials or websites. A successful brand face should exhilarate and inspire the target audience, unkempt branding properties risk doing the opposite, causing doubt and confusion. A brand face is intended to convey the actual brand experience. Consumers rely upon this to make their purchasing decisions.
Understandably the desire always exists for the next new thing and the need to stay current. As a result, over time, the brand face might evolve resulting in a mixed bag of marketing materials and branding. However, it is a mistake for a company to have several design messages sent out at one time without any coherent connection. Careful stewardship is needed to get a brand back on track, honoring the past while still moving forward.
So how do you update your brand face without alienating your existing customer base? Strategy, experience and good graphic design is used to carry a brand's heritage into a new service or product offering while continuing to present a unified message. It is quite remarkable how much a design can be recalibrated. A brand face can be injected with fresh ideas, yet still retain its fundamental soul and still be very recognizable as the original face of the company's brand. When done well, the design confirms and strengthens the relationship with the customer, saying essentially, 'You can count on what you know and trust about this company'.
The core of our commitment as branding professionals is to understand how to identify the value of a company's past and new channels to move it forward. We know that a clear and strong design identity can represent what an organization wants their brand to stand for now and in the future. If requested we often create visual brand strategy or style guides for your businesses or brand that can provide a map in creating an external picture for customers and can act as the internal face of your business strategy. Contact us to discuss your brand.