Time for a change – When to rebrand your business

Let’s talk about “Brand Strategy”! It’s something that most businesses overlook, but it’s essential to set your business apart from the competition. Branding can be used to increase company’s value, set expectations, and give a new path for acquiring customers. If you are just starting out your brand or you’ve been in the market for several years, you probably know by now that people change with time and so does their perception of how brands should look like. Setting your brand for a great start or rebranding however, is not easy and we’ll discuss what to look out for when you’ve made the decision to get a new look.

Time to adapt or get to the next level

Brands like “Typology“, “Curology“ and many others have something in common, apart that they are all successful their wordmark logos, labels, packaging, colors have similarities. Minimalist designs that send the right message to their audience from the get-go. It’s not a crime to have similar looking design, unless you directly copy-paste somebodies work of course, but there are trends and if a business wants to be or stay relevant, they must follow along at some point. By being several years into a successful business illustrates the ability to sustain themselves in a challenging market and newcomers know that, and they just go along with what currently works by creating lookalike products and designs, until the market is saturated.

That’s why branding is the tool that can help adapt new startups that are struggling to gain attention or to get established businesses get onto the next level by differentiation. Designs can quickly go out of fashion and it’s necessary to have an identity that aligns with the current market trends. It kind of feels like a race and when everything starts looking the same, it’s time do things differently.

At what stage should a brand do a refresh?

Businesses are extremely fast paced, where consumer behavior is constantly evolving and customer retention is becoming a huge challenge. So, the major question however is when to rebrand? The answer is when your product goes through its life cycle and reaches brand maturity. Always remember that it is the mature brand that needs to adapt and rebrand itself to retain and acquire customers, while the pre-mature brand/start-up can change its branding strategy is to only acquire.

You should rebrand when:

• Sales start to slow down.
• Increased number of similar looking brands enter the market
• Product prices drop
• Profits begin to decrease
• Social engagement falls

A rebrand can help with:

• Differentiating from the rest of the competition
• Maintaining competitive pricing
• Help with the promotion of the product
• Turning website traffic into sales
• Keeps you relevant in the social space
• Scaling your brand to the next stage

Keep an eye out for new tech

New technology keeps rolling out and to be ahead in the game you’ll need to follow how everything evolves. As you grow your team grows, by keeping yourself updated with design trends of the current markets you’ll know what needs to be done next. The NFT craze is a perfect example for this, it’s new and with-it new roles and departments appear. From event tickets to clothing, it can be implemented in so many ways with products, the least we can do is to observe and take action when the time is right.

Furthermore, keeping an eye out for anything new can give an opportunity to businesses to scale up and serve its consumers in a different way. However, you should know that rebranding and getting a new identity is a critical process, and it should not impact the current essence and history of the business. Thus, develop an appropriate strategy that helps your brand freshen up just like Nike did with RTFKT Studio and Adidas BAYC. Rather than doing the Facebook to Meta, they acquired companies in the NFT space to expand.

To wrap this up

As Heraclitus stated, “There is nothing permanent except change”. This concept can be applied in branding as well, meaning that the brand should not necessarily stick with its initial plan adopted before maturity. Instead, the brands should keep an eye out for the contemporary styles and should change their identity accordingly.