A brand refresh can breathe life into your organization’s identity, but in large enterprises the process is never a simple one.
Managing the changes associated with an updated brand involves careful coordination across global teams and sub-brands, maintaining consistency across all channels at all times, and ensuring both internal and external adoption is successful.
All of this requires more than just a style guidelines document.
In this blog, we walk through what a brand refresh actually is, how it differs from a ‘rebrand’, and how enterprises can manage the process more smoothly and efficiently.
What is a brand refresh?
A brand refresh involves updating elements of your brand’s identity, like its associated visuals, tone of voice, or messaging. Importantly, this is carried out without completely overhauling the brand itself. It’s about evolving the brand, and might include, for example:
- Redesigning a logo or updating the color palette.
- Refreshing or adding to the range of typography, iconography, and design styles used.
- Revising brand messaging and positioning statements so it better reflects the business.
- Making adjustments to tone of voice to help the brand communicate better with its audiences.
For an enterprise marketing team, the process of refreshing a brand can present new, complex challenges; from managing and updating digital assets and ensuring global teams are aligned to ensuring version control and that users are closely following new brand guidelines.
Without a robust design, review, and approval process, branding errors can soon cause widespread content inconsistencies.
But, by leveraging an AI-powered DAM like Bynder to act as its system of record for all brand assets, enterprise brands can, for example, be confident that they’re giving every user access to the most current, pre-approved brand files — whether it’s an updated logo or a revised branded template.
Brand refresh vs. rebranding: What’s the difference?
‘Brand refresh’ and ‘rebrand’ are often used interchangeably, but in reality they mean different things, with each requiring a different level of investment.
A brand refresh essentially means making a strategic update to a brand’s design or messaging without altering that brand’s core identity. Instead, the purpose of the exercise is to ensure that the existing brand remains modern and relevant.
By contrast, a rebrand means that a complete transformation is needed — and this usually includes brand elements like name, mission, visual identity, and the way it positions itself in the marketplace.
While a brand refresh may take several weeks or months, it’s not uncommon for a rebrand to take a year or more to complete.
Why do enterprises require a brand refresh?
Here are just a handful of reasons as to why an enterprise may embark on a brand refresh exercise:
The marketplace has changed
With customer expectations, advancements in technology, and design trends all evolving constantly, enterprises are under increased pressure to remain as relevant and competitive as possible. A brand refresh enables enterprises to replace visuals and messaging that feel outdated with something that appears more in sync with modern marketplace conditions and buyer behaviors.
There’s a merger or acquisition
Brand confusion can quickly start to set in when two different brands merge or one acquires another. Conflicting logos, design languages, and messaging can cause friction both internally and externally. A brand refresh can help create a unified visual and textual identity that reflects a newly combined enterprise’s vision, values, and market position.
The enterprise is scaling up
When an enterprise wants to scale up into new markets and regions, its brand needs to be able to resonate across different cultures, languages, and geographies. In this scenario, an existing brand may not always work well for this purpose, either because something doesn’t translate well, isn’t likely to resonate, or because it may even cause confusion or offence.
A brand refresh allows for the appropriate refinements to be made to brand elements like tone of voice and visuals so that the overall brand becomes better suited to new regions and markets, while maintaining a consistent brand identity overall.
H3: New products or services are being introduced
If an enterprise diversifies, upgrades, or in some cases, radically changes its offerings, its brand needs to be able to reflect that evolution. A brand refresh enables a large organization to publicly move itself on from any messaging and visuals that may have been designed around a legacy suite of products. It means that an enterprise can reposition itself in the marketplace, with an updated brand look and feel that better demonstrates its intended future direction.
The main elements behind a successful brand refresh
To refresh your brand successfully, you need more than just creativity. Your enterprise will need the right structure, management, and technology behind it, and this is where a DAM like Bynder can do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Key components that Bynder DAM can support include:
Centralizing your brand guidelines
Bynder DAM acts as your enterprise’s system of record, allowing you to document and store your updated guidelines in a way that’s easily accessible to whoever needs to see them and ensuring that everyone, from internal teams to external agencies, knows how to apply the brand to content correctly.
Protecting your updated brand assets
Bynder DAM ensures that your logos, fonts, imagery, rich media files, documents, and templates are not only refreshed but also stored securely, version-controlled, and protected against misuse.
Embedding governance and permissions
A DAM solution like Bynder means that your marketing teams can define access levels and automate approvals, so that the right assets always reach the right people, at exactly the right time.
Integrating with your martech stack
Connect the Bynder DAM to CMS, PIM, productivity tools, creative suites, and more to smoothly push your brand assets across platforms.
Measuring asset performance
Use the built-in analytics and insights in Bynder DAM to assess asset adoption and usage, identify gaps, and guide teams on which actions to take to spark improvements.
The key steps in a brand refresh strategy
Here are some key stages that you’ll typically find in a brand refresh project:
Determine the scope of the branding project
Does your enterprise need a brand refresh or a complete rebrand? Begin by carrying out a brand audit; assessing how your brand is currently perceived, reviewing and analysing customer feedback, and examining your brand’s current design elements against modern standards — perhaps even that of your main competitors too.
Kick off a project group or consultation
Bring together the key stakeholders from your enterprise. Together with marketing, brand, sales, product teams, and senior management, you should look to explore where your brand needs to go and what it needs to deliver in the future.
Use DAM to align your teams
Execute your brand strategy flawlessly by using your DAM to store, organize, manage, and distribute any existing and new assets. This approach grants your teams real-time access to approved files and content, encourages more reuse of the right assets, and prevents the usage of outdated materials.
Test changes to your brand with your audience
If possible, you should test updated visuals and messaging with key customer segments, remembering that it’s important to build your brand refresh around emotional impact as well as how it looks and feels, visually.
Roll out brand refresh changes in stages
Avoid overwhelming your teams and audiences by using your DAM to retire legacy assets, before publishing refreshed content by channel, and then spending time tracking how your refreshed brand assets are performing.
Brand refresh FAQs
What is the objective of a brand refresh?
The objective of a brand refresh is to modernize your enterprise’s identity, improve alignment with its business goals, and maintain audience engagement and trust without losing marketplace traction or relevancy.
What do you need for a brand refresh?
You’ll need:
- A strategic plan and clear goals
- Executive buy-in and sponsorship
- Updated design and messaging assets
- A robust DAM platform to help you manage, organize, and distribute your assets and drive user adoption and brand compliance.
Related: Take a look at Bynder’s branding guides in our Resources hub.
How do you know if it’s time for a brand refresh?
If one or more of the following are true of your enterprise, it could be that a brand refresh is needed:
- Your brand feels visually outdated and/or your messaging doesn’t feel accurate anymore.
- You’re seeing multiple instances of inconsistent branding internally and across different digital channels.
- You’re aware that current customer perceptions no longer reflect your organization.
- Your enterprise is expanding globally, and there are doubts about whether the current brand translates well into new markets and regions.
- You feel that the enterprise has outgrown its current brand identity.
- You’ve noticed that newer audiences aren’t engaging with your brand.
Refresh your brand the smart way
With Bynder’s AI-powered DAM at the heart of your enterprise’s brand refresh strategy, your teams can conquer content complexity, align on a global level, benefit from boosts to asset reuse, get content to market faster, and maximize content ROI.
