Businesses often talk about branding, rebranding, and refreshing their branding if they need a change or update. But what do the terms “rebrand” and “refresh” mean? How are they different?
Well, as you might expect, both deal with the concepts of changing your company’s branding in some way to accomplish a handful of different goals. A brand refresh is when a brand tries to bring itself into the future and modernize its image while keeping its core values, strategy, and identity.
A rebrand is a complete change to the brand’s identity and strategy. They aren’t just looking to spruce up their color palette, change their fonts, and switch art styles. Their current strategy is failing or their company values and goals have changed, so they need a new identity and strategy that revives them and reflects their new intentions.
Jason, of BitterRoot Brewing, broke it down a bit in a conversation with CODO on their recent brand refresh, stating “For me, this being a brand refresh vs a full rebrand or the development of a new brand, I found it most challenging to find the balance of creating something new and at the same time retaining enough semblance of our original logo that met the majority of our group’s desires.”
Trying to strike the right balance between new and old can be one of the most difficult parts of a refresh. With a rebrand, this isn’t an issue, but it also means you’re starting completely from scratch which poses its own issues.
A while back, we worked with Mad River Market on a brand refresh by fixing up their logo and making it a bit friendlier without making any large, jarring changes. As a very visible brand, they needed to keep the brand equity they had already built. The last thing we wanted was to confuse their member-owners or potential member-owners who have grown used to seeing their signs on lawns across their neighborhoods. However, their logo felt a little too loud and in-your-face, not reflecting the brand’s goals.
To remedy this, we just made a quick update to the color scheme and font to make it a little friendlier without losing any of the main elements of the design or changing anything to look drastically different.
On the other hand, for Kate Thaisz, we were looking at a more comprehensive shift. She wanted a complete rebrand as opposed to just a minimal refresh. Currently known as Compassionate Choice, Kate has started to feel like her brand could use an update. Providing geriatric care management, Compassionate Choice has struggled with awareness of care management as a whole, connecting with seniors and adult child caregivers, and differentiating herself as the top choice in her area.
After some industry research and a conversation with Kate herself, we realized that a main struggle is creating a name and company position that is immediately understandable as a geriatric care management service to her target audience. Additionally, many other companies that offer similar services share words in their names and are not very precise with their company naming efforts.
Kate liked the idea of her company acting as a beacon, guiding light, or lighthouse to help guide her clients. This brings a comforting feeling to her company’s name and immediately draws people in, helping them feel safe in her care and garnering an immediate sense of trust. From these initial thoughts, we came up with the idea of using a name like Luminary or Illuminated with supportive text that offers more of an explanation of the services offered, like “a beacon of supportive care management” or something similar.
If you’re struggling to decide between a refresh and a rebrand, consider what exactly it is about your branding that you’re looking to change. If you just want to bring yourself out of the past and into the present day but don’t want to change your overall strategy and identity, a refresh should do the trick. However, if your company values, goals, or strategy has changed (or needs to), a full rebrand is the way to go.
Still not sure how to move forward? Drop us a line at hello@recreative.co to start the conversation on how we can help your brand look, feel, and perform its best.
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