Thinking of changing your marketing graphics?
Over time, your business will grow and evolve. You can offer new services or products, enter different markets, or target another demographic.
If this happens, you may need to consider changing your marketing graphics.
However, you must be careful not to undo all the hard marketing and branding work you’ve put in, and you must fully understand how to rebrand for the most effective results.
Your brand tells a powerful story and you don’t want to dilute it by fixing (or breaking) something that doesn’t need fixing!
Here are some times when rebranding your company logo is a bad idea:
1. You are tired or bored with the colors, the image or the font and you want something new. You may have built up a lot of brand equity, which refers to the value of having a well-known name and reputation.
If you don’t rebrand your company logo for the right reasons, you could dilute all this capital you’ve built up. You should take a look at your ideal customer and their data before making important decisions.
Here’s the “old” Gap look on the left and a new one they tried to implement in 2010. The negative feedback was so overwhelming that they soon went back to the classic.
2. Customers don’t understand what you do. Before you start working on your charts to clarify what you offer, take a step back. Is there something unclear in your positioning statement, mission statement, or website copy that is confusing people?
Sometimes a picture is not worth a thousand words; you may need to figure out how to rebrand your written marketing materials instead of your images.
So when should you think about rebranding your company logo?
I’m going to use a very personal example! We are going through a change. We originally chose the emperor penguin after Daniel and I went to see March of the Penguins.
We realized that these majestic creatures were symbolic of the qualities we stand for: Strength, Endurance, Pride, Trustworthiness, Commitment, Loyalty, Togetherness, and most importantly, Nurture.
We are based on nurturing our clients to achieve success and being the support system that a company needs in this technical age. The emperor penguin was the perfect symbol to portray these qualities.
So why change it?
We want to appeal to our existing demographic plus a new demographic: people who are leaving the corporate world for the exciting world of entrepreneurship plus micro-businesses looking for outside help to achieve their goals.
As we move into a new market, we wanted to better showcase our services and modernize our visuals.
Starting with our logo, we recently asked our Facebook followers the question: which one do you like best?
We got some interesting responses: Those who knew us and what we do tended to gravitate towards the more familiar layout (A). Others didn’t see a penguin in some of the designs or saw a woman’s face and hair in others.
While we’re now back on the drawing board, so to speak, this was an incredibly worthwhile exercise. If we had chosen the one we liked best and thrown it away, we could have alienated and confused the very people we want to attract.
Once our logo is finalized, we will move on to updating our website and other marketing materials.
Some other reasons why changing your logo and marketing graphics might be a good idea:
• You need to better differentiate yourself from another business: your color, images, and/or font are too similar.
• If your appearance is outdated, you could be turning customers away. I said tweaking things for the sake of change may be a no-no, but if your 1980s color palette or vintage font type makes you look bad, it’s time to take a hard look at your marketing materials.
• You are in the middle of a merger or acquisition and need to balance two companies in one design. When United and Continental Airlines merged, their creativity did too: You see the word UNITED with the globe that comes from the Continental Airlines guarantee.
• The personality of your organization has changed. Maybe you were a startup on a shoestring budget when you started your journey, and now you’ve increased your profits, customers, and employees.
Investing in your appearance may be a must if you want to stay ahead of the competition.
There are many situations where you need to change your creativity. But you need to focus on why you’re doing it or it could be hurting your reputation, brand value, and revenue. The best way to go through the process is to hire a professional marketing company to do it for you.
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