The Value of a Refresh: How to Reset Your Brand Reputation
After periods of change, stagnation, or difficulty, brands may consider refreshing their brand image to broaden their appeal. In today's fast-paced business environment, brand refreshes and thoughtful changes are necessary to maintain and grow market share.
It’s wise to update your brand image as your brand evolves, so that it remains relevant and representative. You can revitalise your image with a small-scale refresh, without having to undergo a complete redesign. Here are six things you need to examine in your brand when undergoing a refresh.
1. Take action to fix what’s not working for your consumers. Make old and new customers alike happy by reinventing what people used to love about you, or could come to love about you. Before undertaking an expensive brand refresh, it’s important to address tough underlying questions. Why is brand perception low? Is your branding and marketing confused? What works for your competitors? Is your customer service poor? The only way new solutions can become strategic catalysts for change is to lay bare these basics.
2. Ensure your brand proposition and image are aligned. As markets change, you may have strayed from your original proposition. An audit of your brand can help you assess your brand’s position in the marketplace, its strengths and weaknesses, and areas for improvement. By auditing your brand, you will be able to identify off-brand elements and realign them.
3. Consider updating your company style guide and tagline. To bridge the gap between your old and new branding, make sure to fine-tune your message and clarify what you want to convey. What do you do? How can you tell your story in a way that resonates with your audience? Take a deep dive into your messaging and use social media to tell your story and showcase who you are.
4. Conduct a survey to gauge internal brand perceptions. Engaging your employees – your brand builders – not only aligns them to your brand journey, but also provides valuable insights and understanding into your internal brand perception – which is every bit as critical as external brand perceptions. Rather than just buying from you, employees and customers must buy into you.
5. Engage with external stakeholders, from existing clients to sector leaders. It’s important to gauge what your stakeholders and partners think about your brand, and how you can improve it. The use of surveys and interviews is a great method of gaining insight, and interviews in particular will provide more detailed responses.
Furthermore, this dialogue provides a unique and valuable insight into your stakeholders’ viewpoints – what’s important to them, why they care, and what you can do to participate. If your stakeholders are eco-conscious, for instance, it’s critical to make sure your brand strategy meets their sustainability standards, otherwise you risk being left behind. By participating in these conversations, you’ll keep up with trends that you might otherwise miss, and will be able to maintain your relevance, reputation, and authority with your stakeholders.
6. Define your content strategy. Do you have a content strategy? Does your content target your ideal client? Examine your outputs closely and make sure they reflect your aspirations for the business, and your purpose.
You need to know your competitors well, who’s doing well and where you aspire to be. Look at their brand in detail, revisit past content to find out why it works, and how they achieved what they’ve achieved. After gauging what works well for them – and why – you can emulate a strategy that achieves similar results.