Revitalising Your Brand: When and Why to Consider a Refresh

Businesses refresh their brands more often than you might think, sometimes only changing a handful of the things we’ve outlined above as being included in a brand refresh.

From wanting to better appeal to their target market and wanting to stand out from the crowd to the launch of a new service or product, businesses strategically refresh their branding to help meet their business goals.

1. Attract a new audience

Once a business has locked in on their target audience, a brand refresh can help them appeal more to a group of individuals.

With an updated visual identity, brands can get noticed by people who were once outside of their audience. When refreshing the brand, a better-defined brand message, voice and unique selling point (USP) helps to convey value to potential customers.

 2. Stay relevant in a saturated market

In this world of artificial intelligence (AI), consumers see a lot of the same content, ads and branding, leading to advertising fatigue. When potential customers are bored of your content before you even post it, something needs to change.

We often talk about keeping up with trends. Still, it’s more important to ensure your brand is consistently relevant to your target audience before engaging in the latest TikTok or Instagram trend. By conducting a brand refresh or rebrand, your business can better appeal to your target market.

3. Prepare to launch new products or services

Launching a new product or service is a big deal, and something that can drive more traffic than usual to your site. It’s essential to make a good impression with these visitors, as they can easily become customers if they like what they see and experience on your site.

This is where your brand needs to shine; polished graphics, compelling copy, and a clear message are essential for a unified brand.

When is the right time to have a brand refresh?

If you feel disconnected with your audience, your messaging and your brand identity, it’s time for a refresh. If you feel disconnected from your audience, the odds are that they feel the same way about your brand – potentially forcing them to seek products and services from competing brands.

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Brand refresh vs rebrand: which does your business need?

It’s easy to confuse a brand refresh for a rebrand, especially when many visual changes have been made to assets such as a brand’s logo and imagery. However, there are some distinct differences between a rebrand and a brand refresh.

If you need to make fundamental changes to the core of your business – its values and market position – then you’re looking at a complete rebrand. In cases like these, it’s back to the drawing board to establish exactly what your visual identity, brand voice, target audience, and service offering will look like.

Whereas if you are keeping your brand values and market position the same – while potentially changing things such as the logo, brand tone and graphic elements – this would be considered a brand refresh.

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Brand refreshes in action

We’re no strangers to brand refreshes at Refined Marketing, having undergone our refresh at the start of 2024. For our refresh, it was essential for us to keep our values the same, but we honed our target audience and defined our trajectory.

Many visual elements stayed the same, including our colour palette and typography. However, we updated elements of our logo and graphics—out with the rocket and in with the diamond.

Building a timeless brand: how CEWB’s new identity speaks to future growth

Shifting focus towards secondary schools as well as primary schools, CEWB approached us with the intention of evolving its brand. Operating previously as “Jo Whalley Counselling Services”, their existing brand did not resonate with their audience or reflect their future growth aspirations.

Retaining their newly chosen name, CEWB embarked on a brand refresh journey to better communicate their mission and values with their audience. We worked closely with them to develop a new brand strapline to communicate their mission – “Complete Emotional Well-Being: Supporting Every Step”.

It was essential to ensure their visual identity was clean and professional yet versatile enough to accommodate future growth. Complete copywriting made sure that their visual identity and brand voice were in sync, and on-page SEO work helped to ensure that the fundamentals were in place for search engines to crawl the content.

Do you need help refining your brand identity?

Let Refined Marketing help you shine – get in touch with our team to see how we can help at letstalk@refinedmarketing.co.uk

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