Preparing for a brand refresh: part 1

Refreshing your brand is more than just a new logo or updated website—it’s about strategically evolving to better connect with your audience, differentiate from competitors, and drive long-term, sustainable success.

And trust me. Your audience will know the difference between a quick fix to try to attract more people to your brand vs. a truly authentic change that reveals who your company is and what you're about. It's like they can smell it.

Before diving head first into a brand refresh just because someone at the head of the table says they want to see some changes to your imagery, how you sound, or what your website looks like, there are key foundational steps your business should take to ensure the process is data-driven, effective, and aligned with company goals and existing and potential customer expectations.

TL;DR: Just drop me a note and let's chat.

Conduct a Comprehensive Competitive Analysis

Although a refreshed brand can be an enticing and exciting thought (both for executives and creative leads), it’s essential to take the time to understand your competitive landscape. Consider the following:

• Who is doing what:

  • Identify key competitors and analyze their branding, messaging, and market positioning. Consider looking outside your direct competitors for ideas that can give you an edge. What are the trends or shifts in your or other industries that you need to be aware of before jumping in and making updates?

• Why are they doing it:

  • Evaluate the strategic decisions behind their branding. Look beyond copy and images. You may find that some of their decisions should not be emulated, while others could be beneficial to your plans. This is where the expertise of multiple individuals in your organization will come in handy. Reach out to your IT, sales, marketing, creative, communications, and other leads to get additional perspectives on the work and trends you're seeing to make sure you understand the full context and scope of the why. This will help you determine whether their strategies are working as intended within the right context.

• Effectiveness vs. Ineffectiveness: 

  • Once you identify what works well and what falls flat, explore how the effective lessons can be modified to benefit your business specifically and document your learnings in a prioritized list. Top items should be the work that will provide the highest return on investment for the company in the shortest amount of time or with the smallest level of effort. You may not be able to make all the updates at once. The prioritized list will help in determining detailed plans and strategy later and can help with developing a roadmap across multiple departments and teams, if necessary.

• Keyword Research: 

  • Understand what keywords your competitors rank for and identify opportunities. This can include deciding to make your product more visible against a competitor's product and directly positioning your product as better in some way, or it can mean going after keyword spaces that are currently underutilized by competitors but that align with your product offering and updated brand direction. This can help you find new, engaged customers and targeted subgroups that hadn't been considered previously. NOTE: make sure you actually have alignment with these groups with your product or brand offering. If you don't, flag these areas as places for opportunity in the future for product or brand value expansion and document ways in which you can work toward this space.

• Mood Boards and Aesthetic Analysis: 

  • Compare the visual branding of your company to others, including logo styles, color palettes, and typography. What story are you currently telling with your brand's aesthetic, and what story are others telling? Where is there room to improve, simplify, and target the customers you want? To that end, what kind of customers are you attracting, and who do you want to attract? Who is your ideal customer? What space is there to own that your brand could fill? Do you need to make more dramatic shifts in the aesthetics of your brand to attract the customers you want? If you're considering more dramatic updates, this is a great place in the process to collect data from your existing or potential customers with a survey that compares different looks against one another to ensure you're on the right track with your ideas.

• Product Page and Pricing Analysis: 

  • Examine competitor pricing structures and product presentation strategies. What information is important for someone making a purchase in your industry? What order should the information be in? What is the ideal purchase cadence? The product page should align with your overall company goals in regards to purchases. For example, if an ideal customer purchases every month, highlight consistent product use and benefits over time, along with a reason for them to subscribe with a discount or rewards program. There are several strategies that can be used to convert at the ideal behavior. All customer journeys and messages should align to this ideal, once established.

• Target Demographic Analysis: 

  • Identify who your competitors are attracting and whether their audience currently overlaps with yours or may in the future, if you update your target demographics. Understand that your target audience will be seeing your competitors consistently through targeted ad campaigns. What would make you stand out if your ads or messages go head-to-head?

• Social Media Performance: 

  • Evaluate engagement rates, content strategy, and brand voice across your competition. Again, look for areas of overlap and determine ways to improve on what you're seeing, or identify new audiences or new approaches with research and data from other companies to refine your own strategy.

• Website SEO and ORM (Online Reputation Management): 

  • Assess competitor search rankings, backlink strategies, and overall online sentiment. Identify the ways in which you can compete that fits into your budget and resources. NOTE: this area is rapidly changing with the integration of AI. However, SEO optimized Q&As about your product and your brand on your website are going to be mined by these AI bots, so make sure this is part of your strategy.

• Content Pillars: 

  • What themes do you focus on in your messaging? Remember that your customers are only interacting with you for, at BEST, a handful of minutes every WEEK. So keep the content messages simple and focused on exactly what you want people to remember about your brand. "Fresh," "fun," "clean," "premium," -- whatever those pillars are, make sure they are showing up consistently across all touchpoints.

    
    

I know that's a lot to start with. So in the next post, we'll get into analyzing how your existing customers perceive you and how we can use that information to make strategic choices for the future of your brand. Fun!