How to refresh your brand without losing your audience 

Many companies are augmenting their products or services with AI and want to refresh their brands — the process of changing a brand’s image, voice, or another aspect of the business without losing its core messaging.

Ideally, a brand evolves over time, changing its look, feel, and content. The intentional, consistent growth of branding over time is called brand evolution. This slow, deliberate series of changes reflects the company’s growth and position in the marketplace. Good brand evolution is incremental and intentionally parallels the company’s growth.

A brand refresh can help maintain customer trust, retain your company’s identity, and create continuity while strengthening your brand’s presence. Let’s look at how to refresh a brand properly to grow your business and retain your customers.

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Key reasons to refresh rather than rebrand

A refresh offers continuity, reassuring customers that the brand is still alive and well, just with a makeover.

But there are times when a more drastic or sudden change is necessary, and a rebrand may make sense — when a company throws out existing branding materials and starts from scratch, completely changing its identity, messaging, mission, and sometimes even its name.

Most companies resort to a full rebrand only to survive a PR crisis or integrate another company, which requires constructing a new, shared story. However, a rebrand risks alienating or excluding your existing customer base.

A refresh shows that you understand your market and react positively to a changing world. It often boils down to maintaining your existing customer base, assuring customers of your continued excellence, and building trust.

Here’s what to look out for when refreshing your brand:

• Maintain buyer trust: Buyers expect the same treatment they’ve always received.
• Reinforce brand recognition: Give customers a familiar sense of your brand even as you change its look.
• Create continuity: As your business grows, bring customers along on that journey with you.
• Show modernity and growth: Show awareness of your position in the marketplace and your ability to adapt.

Responsibilities of a brand refresh team

A brand refresh is a group project. Individual contributors may run with the creative, but the executive team must set the vision. Without a strong sense of how leadership wants customers to feel and think about the company, creatives will fall flat when telling the story of the refreshed brand.

Here are the roles and responsibilities of a brand refresh:

• Executive team: Set the new vision of the company while maintaining the existing company messaging and story.
• Directors/management: Communicate the vision and manage the creatives.
• Creative team: Build a new message, look, and feel that creatively interprets the leadership team’s vision and exemplifies the company’s story.

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How to protect brand continuity

To best protect your brand, work with executive leadership to outline the desired outcomes of the refresh. Here are some ways to strategize your refresh before approaching the creative team.

• Let leadership decide the vision: What feeling does the team want the refreshed branding to give customers? What descriptors, examples from other disciplines, and selling points should the final product include?
• Define elements of continuity: Provide guardrails for change by designating which parts of the branding should remain. This can include color, word choice, a feeling, or parts of the visual representation that best represent the brand.
• Look at your existing branding guide: Examine why previous decisions about the brand were made. Which should stay, and which are negotiable?
• Document decisions: Document how and why you made decisions about the refresh in case issues arise down the road.

Refresh to stay relevant

Brand refreshes are critical to growing your business because they show that your brand grows and evolves over time to stay relevant. Complete rebrands usually aren’t necessary unless your company undergoes a drastic change.

Change can be scary, but your teams will navigate a refresh. Plan and act with the customer in mind, maintain consistency, and stay true to your company’s central messaging and story, and you’ll retain customers’ trust throughout the refresh process.