How can “high-growth marketing” ensure my brand refresh is worth the time and effort?
For the third article in our series examining how “high-growth marketing” helps businesses accelerate, we look at why it’s rarely wise to overlook the opportunity to update your visual identity. The visual “alphabet” of your brand is rarely a “nice-to-have” — and nowadays improving it can be done more easily than you may think, thanks to recent developments in high-growth marketing.
The Challenge
Visual branding is the outerwear that communicates the organisation within. Everyone who encounters your communications is exposed to how you use words, images, shapes and colours — yet branding is often overlooked and allowed to fray. Why?
Perhaps it’s because brand design tends to be considered a non-measurable activity that can be delayed without impact. You don’t miss what you don’t have - and the absence of having a strong visual brand is rarely felt.
Within most organisations there will be some that do recognise its fatigue, but when they argue their case, they lack sufficient weight and urgency to get it signed-off. The marketer’s assertion that an updated brand will lead to a significant growth boost is often seen as more optimistic than empirical. Marketing campaigns take precedence as a result.
Five traditional misconceptions about rebrands
Objections to visual identity updates are typically based around five misconceptions: it will require significant expenditure to execute well; it will be resource intensive; it will take months to achieve; and it will be disruptive to the working practices of the organisation in terms of the changes required to install a new branding.
There is also the perceived risk that it may not result in an improvement — and could even be worse. This is driven by high-profile visual identity failures such as Consignia, Gap and Mastercard over the years. More recently, we have encountered several cases ourselves where the specialist brought in to create the new branding essentially runs out of time for revisions and walks away — leaving their client with a brand that it doesn’t like and won’t ever fully implement.
Ultimately, the opportunity to make changes to your brand identity rarely gets the consideration it deserves. It doesn’t have to be this way — and companies are missing out on growth as a result.
Why It’s A Problem
Fast-growing companies, and SMEs in particular, can suffer from brand inertia. They can quickly outgrow the elements of visual design that embody them — logo, photography, colours, illustrations, typefaces and so on — before they even realise it.
These building blocks of their brand can become tired and unfashionable. A brand will become so familiar to those using it the result is that employees are less likely to be cognisant of whether it is still relevant to the company it represents.
When those within an organisation have become “bored” with a brand identity they may not realise that these effects are felt by all stakeholders. As a result, a brand is left to stagnate, and business performance suffers through slow attrition — as competitors enter the market and move the visual brand environment for the sector forward.
Conversely, a refreshed brand can have a catalysing and energising impact on everyone it touches: employees, customers, prospects, suppliers, partners and so on. It can help a brand break into new customer groups, change perceptions that had been holding it back, and win back competitive advantage from competitors.
Perceiving improvements to visual identify as a “soft” and “risky” investment without tangible gain has been repeatedly dis-proven, despite what you might think, so it’s time to reevaluate the cost-benefit analysis relating to your brand.
What can you do to change this?
Here’s how to adopt a high-growth marketing approach to your brand identity:
- Band updates don’t need to last an age or cost the earth and they should be done more regularly. Contrary to orthodox belief, for SMEs and companies with simple structures, a refresh and overhaul to remove the cobwebs and provide much-needed focus and modernity in terms of your brand visual design can be achieved in hours and days, not weeks and months. As many companies now rely less on physical brand assets such as printed materials and signage, brands can be updated far more easily than in the past. The cost-of-entry is lower than it has ever been. Instead of approaching your brand every five years as a gargantuan task, it may be better for a fast-growing company to evaluate their brand every two years at most — to ensure its brand remains fresh. There is really no reason not to at least see what options are out there that could give your brand a growth boost.
- Brands can greatly benefit from evolutions as well as revolutions. If changing your logo for example is simply out of the question — and there are many good reasons why this should be — there are still a lot of options remaining that involve making essential tweaks that will take you a long way towards a more effective brand identity. For example, brands can often change one or elements such as how they use colour, illustration, shapes or photography, in order to give their brand a fresh look, without chucking the baby out with the bath water. A fresh look achieved in this way, can transform your communications and online sales platforms, impacting sales positively without incurring any real risk.
- Find a brand design partner with a high-growth mindset. Succeeding with a high-growth approach to refreshing your brand in this way is highly dependent on finding a design partner who shares your philosophy and can work closely with you. Find an agency who is prepared to take time to really get under the hood of your business and collaborate and iterate closely with you — on your turf and on your terms. Find an organisation or individual who is prepared to be flexible, and not just swoop in, hold a brainstorm and then retreat into an ivory tower to create an idea that they love (but you do not) then run out of time to make significant further changes. For example, we always guarantee to our branding clients that they will be 100% satisfied with the proposed branding design, and provide unlimited iteration and revision until that is the case. A design that all decision-makers are bought into is far more likely to get used than one that has grudging acceptance. Giving people a stake in the process and allowing real iteration and collaboration enables this.
Your brand is a powerful weapon in your armoury — so use it!
In conclusion, growing companies can easily lose track of just how much their business has evolved without their visual identity keeping up. If your customers are increasingly interacting with your brand in new or different ways — online or on social media platforms — are the foundations of your branding still suited to interact in these new environments?
We regularly encounter companies who have developed logos, colour schemes, and imagery that are completely unsuitable for such digital engagement. Others use typefaces and diagrams that do not translate to represent their brand digitally. Some have UX issues that hinder all their efforts.
Third party advice can provide fresh perspective and help catalyse change, with many agencies, ourselves included, happy to offer visual-branding audits to potential clients as a no-cost loss leader. Ultimately, a revitalised brand can be the difference between winning or losing customers; between treading water and explosive growth. An updated visual identity can and will provide extra firepower to your high-growth marketing campaigns and help you stand out versus your competitors. After all, your brand identity needs to evolve just like your customers’ requirements do.
In the next article in this series, we’ll look at how you can start getting digital content working much harder for you, propelling you to front-of-mind with your customers and heading off your competitors. With high-growth marketing, anything is possible.
Other articles in the “What is High-Growth Marketing?” series:
Introduction: What is high-growth marketing — and could it work for your company?
1.What changes could make my marketing less tactical and more efficient?
2. Would improving my brand be really worth the time and effort? — THIS ARTICLE
3. How can I use content to really generate demand? — COMING SOON
4. How can my business achieve tangible results from influencer marketing? — COMING SOON
5. How can I realise additional value from existing customer relationships? — COMING SOON
Follow the series to gain insight into our experiences of what high-growth marketing can really achieve.
Let us tackle your challenges too
We’d like to make this as real and specific as we can. So if you have a specific challenge you’d like us to tackle for challenge six, we’d love to hear from you — please get in touch with us at challenges@blockinfluence.com and we’ll publish our responses to the best ones here.
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Who Is Block Influence?
Based in London, England, Block Influence provides high-growth marketing solutions for high-growth companies — from blockchain start-ups to established fintech companies to to rapidly expanding consumer brands. With data and insight at the core of our offer, we provide world-class acceleration tools, strategies and services to help your business achieve its growth goals. If you’d like to hear more about our products and services, get in touch.
