Getting a brand refresh is pretty important for all businesses. It stops a brand gradually becoming stale over time. But when should you get a brand refresh? Too soon and it could confuse your audience. Too late and you could look out of touch.

What is a brand refresh?

Firstly, we need to distinguish between a brand refresh and a rebrand. They’re both quite similar, but essentially a brand refresh is a bit of a tidy up. A rebrand on the other hand is more extreme, tackling the brand’s core identity resulting in potentially bigger visual identity changes and in some cases even a name change.

If you’d like to read more about the differences between a brand refresh and a rebrand, then check out my blog; ‘Rebrand vs. brand refresh’.

Reasons to get a brand refresh

There are a few reasons that a business might need a brand refresh, but here are the top four reasons:

Replace outdated elements

As briefly mentioned, a good reason, and probably the most common reason to get a brand refresh, is to replace outdated elements. Styles come and go, and if a designer has used graphic elements that are hugely trending, then chances are these are going to date quickly. As a golden rule, it’s important that trending styles aren’t used when logo designing, but if the brand is new or wants to make waves, then they may opt for trending supporting graphics. If so, then these will need to be reviewed more frequently.

For example, right now, mottled, grainy, desaturated gradients are trending, especially in the tech industry. But they’re all starting to look the same, and before we know it, they’ll soon be a design timestamp like 1980s purple and turquoise tracksuit patterns.

Show business growth and evolution

In a lot of cases, a business may outgrow its brand. If rapid growth has occurred within the business then this will happen sooner rather than later. 

Alternatively, they might have evolved a bit. Not to the extent where they need a whole new name or identity, but just enough so new brand visuals help with aligning them to their new position.

Increase engagement

Sometimes a brand might be in all the right places at the right time, but they’re just not quite resonating with the audiences, whether it’s down to visual messaging or something else. Sometimes a bit of a refresh, usually within the marketing visuals, might help increase engagement.

Save money on a full rebrand

In some cases, a business might thinks it needs a full rebrand, but what they actually need is a brand refresh. This will save them time, money and any risk of their audiences accepting big changes. Usually if a new, funky competitor appears on the scene a business might feel that they need a whole new facelift, when in actual fact they just need a tidy up on what is already a well trusted and established brand.

When to get a brand refresh

Now that we’ve gone through the reasons of a brand refresh, it’s time to discuss when to get it done, and to be honest, there’s no real solid answer here…sorry to disappoint you there. But basically, it all depends on a number of factors and usually it’s a case of what feels right.

If you’re at the point with your business where you already have style guides or brand guidelines, then presumably these guides will contain dates and have version controls on them, which is very helpful.

A good idea is to have a reminder to go off every year to go through these documents. Look for anything that doesn’t feel like the brand anymore. Maybe even get other people to look through them, including your go-to graphic designer. Get them all to take notes and communicate with each other your shared feelings.

It might be that everything is hunky dory and nothing needs changing. If that’s the case, you might want to re-date the guides and change the version numbers on them, just so that when you’re handing them around it doesn’t look like some ancient relic. Treat it like when you get your boiler serviced and they add the date to a magnet on the side as a reminder that everything has been checked and is up-to-date. It’s kind of a servicing for your brand.

If things don’t feel right and things need changing, then you need to figure out what to change. Do some bits look out of date? Do some bits not resonate with your audiences anymore? This sort of analysing determines to what extent the brand refresh needs.

For visual changes, whether it be graphical elements or the big ol’ logo design itself, I recommend that these get seriously looked at least every year and no more than 5 years. For example, after 5 years your logo still might look absolutely brilliant, but a good designer will know the way the trends are going and could probably make some very subtle changes that keep the logo staying hip and fresh and give it a new lease of life. Now when I say trends, there’s actually a difference between ‘trends’ and ‘trending’. Trending is what is cool right now, while trends are the slow evolution of designs over time. Having the foresight to see what will look more acceptable down the line is good for logo tweaks. These subtle tweaks are changes that don’t confuse your audience or need every version of it changing instantly, but more of a ‘this is the new logo and we use this when creating new things now’.

Look at Google for example. When they first got really well known, they had their old serif logo. I always thought that this logo looked dated with its harsh dark shadow gradients, until one day they removed them. That small change brought that logo into the current time period. A few years later they rebranded to what we have now, but still, this small change in the shadow made such an impact for a company that really needed to be telling people ‘we’re the future’.

In addition, you don’t want to be making dramatic changes to your logo quite frequently, especially if you’re not going to change every instance of it. This can confuse your audience and even your staff.

If you’re unsure whether you need a brand refresh or a rebrand, or you know you need one but just not sure what bits to tackle, then feel free to get in touch for a FREE discovery call to go through what your business needs.

Cheers.