Brand Refresh Strategy 2025: What It Is & Why Your Brand Needs One
Brand Refresh vs Rebrand? Key Differences Explained
Everything around us is constantly changing - people, situations, technology and even the world itself. Evolution is a relentless process that keeps going and going. It’s constant and inevitable. It never stands still. This also holds good for brands. They are living things. Standing still means losing relevance, differentiation and your USP as others catch up, blatantly copy or out-innovate you. Standing still for too long simply results in going backwards which will in most cases lead to certain brand death.
Brands must evolve as everything else in this world. Brand evolution can take the form of a brand refresh or a more radical rebranding. A brand refresh is updating, modernising and energising an existing brand, not fundamentally changing it. This can involve tweaking the positioning and messaging, refining the tone of voice, or a redesign of the logo and/or visual identity. The core brand, however, remains the same.
Rebranding in contrast is a significant strategic directional overhaul and shift to reposition a brand for future growth and success. It is usually undertaken when smaller, more ‘cosmetic’ brand refresh changes are insufficient to address severe challenges or seize new opportunities. It typically involves significantly changing a brand’s strategy, including positioning, core values, personality and messaging, as well as a significant shift in brand logo and visual identity. It can go as far as even changing a brand’s name.
At Design Bridge and Partners we like to compare it to a building project: A brand refresh is enhancing - repainting and updating the furniture, while rebranding is reinventing - gutting and fundamentally rebuilding.
What Is the Value of a Brand Refresh? Key Benefits Explained
A brand is in essence the summation of psychological benefits resulting from a particular set of associations in the minds of your audiences, customers, employees or other stakeholders. In Jeff Bezos' words, ‘your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.’ Your brand is a core principle that drives performance, culture, experience and action. It is NOT merely an element of your communications strategy. It can have a great impact when used as more than a communications function. BrandZ global brand value research consistently shows that powerful brands significantly outperform the market.
As brands are valuable, they need maintenance, and a brand refresh from time to time is part of that maintenance. If done well, a brand refresh makes a brand look more modern, up-to-date and put a more single-minded emphasis on its core proposition. It can create a better alignment with current market trends, increase a brand’s competitive edge, and enhance customer perception and trust.
As all brands need to evolve, the question is therefore not so much ‘to refresh or not to refresh’ but rather ‘when is the right time to refresh?’. This brings us to the question of timing and the cost of doing nothing versus the cost of doing something.
Need a brand refresh? When Should You Refresh Your Brand? Key Signs to Look For
Given the investment, effort and time needed for a brand refresh, a refresh for refresh’s sake does not make any sense from a marketer's point of view. Brand and design must support business strategy and ultimately help to increase purchase intent, otherwise they turn into art.
Timing is everything. But it’s not always obvious when the time is right. Many brand refreshes are also met with criticism when the rationale behind them isn’t clear. If done at the right time, a brand refresh can prompt re-evaluation, attract more attention/new customers and boost the bottom line, but a clear strategy to justify and drive the refresh is vital. Go too early and you risk wasting resources, time and disruption. Go too late and you risk your brand looking tired and in decline compared to its peers.
Understanding when to refresh is a valuable skill for brands. So, what’s the right time for a brand refresh? Tired brands in decline are in most obvious need for one, but brands may also want to signal change through an inspiring and motivating brand refresh. Changes in the market or in customer behaviour may also push brands to act. Design Bridge and Partners experience and data from countless brand refreshes over the last 20 years indicate that consumer brands need to refresh every 6 years on average. This, of course, is an average and there are factors that might require an earlier brand refresh.
Here are some common indicators generally recognised as brand refresh triggers:
- Evolving strategic business objectives: When an organisation undergoes an evolution of its business strategy, an inspiring and motivating brand refresh can help signal this shift, especially to the brand’s workforce who are tasked to implement the evolved business strategy.
- Shifts in target audience demographics or preferences: If a brand’s target customers have evolved (their demographics, values, needs, preferences or purchase behaviours), the brand needs to adapt to stay relevant. Clear indications are declining customer engagement or sales. Alternatively, if a brand wants to target very different, new segments, the brand might need to refresh to appeal to these new audiences.
- Expanding product/services portfolio: Adding new products/services to the portfolio, especially when moving into adjacent categories or looking at premiumisation. This might necessitate a brand refresh to align the brand with the extended portfolio.
- Competitors, new entrants or innovations changing the rules: The competitive landscape is never static. A brand’s major competitors might have moved on and refreshed their brands. Equally, disruptive technologies can reshape entire industries. Or new players emerge. Again, clear indications are declining customer engagement, sales or stalling growth. A brand refresh might be needed to re-establish differentiation, highlight competitive advantage or address emerging threats.
- Design cues are changing: After a while, without any refresh, any brand will look and feel old-fashioned. The simple reason: Design cues are constantly evolving. The brand’s visual assets, logo, colours, typography, image style, etc and messaging might no longer resonate with the target audiences or reflect the brand’s offerings. This can lead to a perception of being out of touch.
Major partners and stakeholders believe the brand is dated: An early warning sign that a brand refresh is most probably overdue, is when many of your major business partners and stakeholders start voicing their belief that your brand feels dated compared to your peers.
The Brand Refresh Process: A Step-by-Step Guide
At Design Bridge and Partners, our brand refresh process is highly collaborative. To ensure our clients can get the absolute best out of us.
Kick-off: Every brand refresh journey starts by agreeing on a clear set of shared objectives with our client. We get everyone on the same page as to what we are aiming to achieve, to make sure there are no unwanted surprises along the way.
Research & analysis: This is hugely important as a brand refresh is about updating, modernising and energising an existing brand, not fundamentally changing it. It is therefore vital to identify precisely what needs changing and what must not be changed. Our teams immerse themselves in research and brand audits to develop a strong and nuanced understanding of the client’s business, its strategy, understanding the audiences’ needs and the competitive landscape. Each brand refresh project will employ a different set of research methods and level of depth. These may include qualitative and quantitative research methods, such as: depth interviews, focus groups, social listening, data analysis and competitive benchmarking. We also employ a number of audit tools such as an RDE visual codes analysis. RDE stands for ‘residual, dominant, emergent.’ It’s an analysis of changing visual and verbal codes across categories, channels and brands that help identify the pace and direction of change happening in a market. We also use a visual equity analysis tool called VISEQS to assess a brand’s visual equities. It’s a methodology that provides a systematic, visual framework to assess a brand’s existing visual equities and develop hypotheses to better convey the desired positioning moving forward. It helps to determine what elements of a current brand visual and verbal identity to keep, evolve, lose or add. A third tool we have at our disposal is a logo health check that analyses logos on four dimensions, impression (how well does the logo fit with the brand strategy?), interaction (how well does the logo deliver on a functional level?), responsiveness (how well does the logo respond to the needs of the brand’s audiences?) and resilience (how future-proof and sustainable is the logo?), using a simple traffic light system (green = works, amber needs improving, red = fails).
Definition: The insights gathered, and conclusions drawn during the research and audits are then synthesised to inform the brand refresh solution - the degree of shift that is required from the current brand. This might include refinements to the brand positioning, messaging, brand personality and brand voice as well as a brief to update visual elements such as logo, colour palette, typography etc. Other refinements might include the optimization of the brand’s website and digital presence for SEO, evolved brand activation and campaign strategies.
Design: The brand refresh/redesign brief from the define phase will be translated into a set of creative ‘concepts’, which seek to visually express the associations defined within the brand refresh strategy. These creative concepts will be compared, contrasted and refined, in collaboration with the client, to reach the strongest end result.
Implementation: The brand refresh needs to be effectively communicated to audiences. Guidelines, training and marketing materials and generative tools will help to bring the brand refresh to life across all touchpoints as effectively as possible.
Measurement: To assess whether the brand refresh is successful KPIs need to be defined and then measured following the brand refresh roll-out. Best practice is to define the KPIs, and if possible, to also record a measurement with both internal and external audiences before the brand refresh. KPIs should include brand tracking attributes such as brand funnel metrics from awareness to loyalty as well as business metrics.
Common brand refresh mistakes to avoid
There are some common mistakes that can threaten any brand refresh project. Here are a few of these typical pitfalls:
Going too early or too late: As already mentioned, one of the biggest pitfalls is embarking on a brand refresh too early as it would simply be wasting valuable budgets and management time. It might also be trying to fix something that is not actually broken. This can happen if the issues lie somewhere else, and are not really brand related, meaning a brand refresh wouldn’t be able to solve the issues anyway. Another common trigger for going too early is new leadership who simply want to make their mark as quickly as possible, regardless whether a brand refresh is really already needed. Going too late on the other hand is very often caused by concerns of the budgets required for a brand refresh, which are seen as a cost and not an investment. This can then, coupled with underestimating the opportunity costs of doing nothing, very often lead to postponing an essential brand refresh again and again.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater: A brand refresh is about updating, modernising and energising, not fundamentally rebranding. A common risk is that something that was meant to be a subtle brand refresh turns into full rebranding, destroying valuable brand assets in the process. Just think of the ill-thought-out elimination of the Tropicana ‘orange with the straw’ on their packaging in 2009. This usually happens when a client and their agency team get over excited with creating something new (which many see as much more exciting) and not doing their due diligence to identify a brand’s valuable heritage and equities.
Underestimating cost and time investments: Although a brand refresh is not as radical as a rebranding project, it is still a major branding task. To be successful a brand refresh requires realistic budgets.
Avoiding a core brand refresh in favour of developing sub-brands/stand-alone brands: This is huge. It very often happens in the wake of product and service extensions. The teams responsible for these create sub-brands or stand-alone brands, often claiming that the core brand wouldn’t be able to stretch. Typical rationales put forward are ‘we’re targeting a very different audience, the offer would not be credible under our core brand, we will be competing with specialist brands, or our brand is not modern enough’. So rather than strengthening the core brand through a brand refresh and building value propositions that work under the core brand, all energy goes into new sub-brand/brand creation – again much more fun for the teams. The result: The core brand gets neglected, fragmented, and will undoubtedly look rather old-fashioned and out-of-touch after some time when compared with all the new shiny brand creations.
Four successful brand refresh case studies examples
Our work with Canon showcases how a brand refresh can support an organisation’s diversification and restructure. Canon is a multinational technology company, specialising in optical, imaging and industrial products. It had diversified significantly since the creation of the original brand. In 2021, Canon restructured its business into four divisions: Printing Group, Imaging Group, Medical Group and Industrial Group. These key business lines, however, were not well represented by the brand, and Canon’s recessive brand identity lacked the dynamism of an innovative leader in a digital world.
Design Bridge and Partners were tasked with a brand refresh, elevating Canon’s brand to be as inspiring as its innovative products. Building on Canon’s unique visual brand assets, we created a refreshed brand identity that unites and reflects Canon’s varied portfolio. Through the authentic and single-minded idea: ‘Reveal the Truth’ we injected greater energy and modernity into the brand. This idea reflects the DNA shared by all Canon products and the unique value they offer the world - imaging tech that reveals truth in countless ways every day.
Cancer Research UK is another example of a highly successful brand refresh. CRUK is the world's leading independent cancer charity. Its work is almost entirely funded by the public through donations, legacies, fundraising and partnerships. CRUK’s tireless work builds on 100+ years of scientific research, however most people struggle to recall any one advancement that’s been made in that time. The brand needed to better reflect the magnitude of their work, making scientific advancement more tangible, and connecting the work inside and outside of the lab by balancing humanity and science.
The refreshed brand is built around the idea of significant moments. Collectively, these significant moments tell the brand story of the cumulative progress CRUK has made, and continues to make, in beating cancer. In its refreshed digital-first expression, we built on the charity’s strong legacy, reputation and well-established brand equity, helping the brand to become clearer, louder, with a deeper meaning.
The brand refresh gave CRUK a better cut through in a competitive fundraising environment by demonstrating the human impact of its vital work in an engaging and inspiring way. Since the refresh it has become the UK’s #1 Most Loved Charity Brand.
Vodafone is an example of how periodic brand refreshes can keep a brand relevant and aligned with its business strategy. Design Bridge and Partners’ relationship with Vodafone began in 2001. Since then, Vodafone has built a worldwide customer base of over 500 million in 80 countries. In 2001, Vodafone marked its ambition to move from being a telecommunications company to become a total communications company, with a brand positioning ‘The future is exciting. Ready?’. We implemented this, evolving the Vodafone brand in line with its purpose-led belief that new technologies and digital services will positively transform society, enhancing quality of life across the world.
In the late 2010s the way in which customers interact with brands had again changed dramatically. For Vodafone, with its over 500 million customers worldwide, it’s essential that their brand identity is built with digital as the default. Our recent work focused on a brand platform with an updated positioning and a more meaningful role for tech as part of accelerated digital life: ‘We connect for a better future’. This positioning shifted the Vodafone brand from me to we, tech to human, enabling Vodafone to differentiate as a supportive enabler of progress for people. We modernised Vodafone’s brand again, creating a living identity that puts people and the human spirit first. We unleashed the famous speechmark to highlight the relationship between humanity and technology. The speechmark device now sits front and centre, coherently linking all communications. These brand refreshes have enabled Vodafone's brand to become more responsive and adaptive to its environment, showcasing its role in connecting people and technology.
Sometimes a brand refresh is not about modernising or creating new assets but refocusing on long neglected brand assets. Hellmann’s originated in the eponymous Hellmann's deli in NYC. However, by 2019, Hellmann’s ubiquity had created a misconception that it was mass-produced – lacking 'real food 'credentials.
Our brand refresh took Hellmann’s back to its origins. Proudly placing Hellmann’s back amongst the authentic products modern food lovers were seeking with a brand platform ‘On the side of food’. We spoke to living relatives who had personal memories of The Hellmann’s and how Margaret Hellmann tied a blue ribbon around her hand-made mayo to indicate its freshness to customers. We reintroduced the hand-made textures, and appetising colour palette, giving new prominence to the blue ribbon tied with care. Through bringing meaning and consistent use, the Blue Ribbon is now the 3rd most recognised distinctive asset for Unilever. Hellmann’s is now a $2.5bn food brand and in the top 5 most valuable brands within Unilever’s global portfolio.
How to select the right brand design agency partner for a successful brand refresh
Selecting an agency for a brand refresh project is about finding a strategic partner who can help elevate your existing brand, taking it to the next level by making it more memorable, identifiable, and emotionally compelling. Look for agencies with a proven track record in brand refresh and redesign projects. These projects are not about starting from scratch. They are about the challenge to balance existing brand equities with modernity. This tension between the past and future must be understood as a creative opportunity.
Choose the agency that you believe is the best fit for your business and that has the potential to deliver the brand refresh results you're looking for. Here are some useful factors to consider:
- How well do they grasp your industry, your competitors, and in particular your business? Are they asking the right questions?
- Do they offer innovative and data-driven branding strategies? Are they providing solid audits, strategic thinking, or are they simply executing?
- Are they sensitive and respectful to your existing brand? Do they take pride in building on existing foundations and assets, enhancing, optimizing and elevating? Do they relish the tension between the past and the future?
- Do you feel comfortable with their team? Remember it’s people who make things work. Is there a good cultural fit?
How do they manage projects? Have they got sound processes? What's their communication style?
Conclusion: Key Takeaways for a Successful Brand Refresh
Brands need to evolve otherwise they die. Keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to what your customers want, to what the trends in your and adjacent categories are, and to the extent your competitors are evolving. Don’t let your business strategy outgrow your brand. But equally never embark on a brand refresh and redesign for the sake of it – make sure your rationale for one is watertight. Think very carefully before changing key brand assets. Be predictive rather than reactive – try to find the right timing for your brand refresh. Consistent brand tracking and assessment of your brand’s health can assist in mastering this.
At Design Bridge and Partners, we design brands with magnetism that motivate and move. Brands with the energy to pull people towards them with an irresistible force that compels and connects. Brand refreshes and redesigns are an essential part of keeping a brand relevant and magnetic. The tension between the past and future is a creative opportunity that we relish.
Ready to refresh your brand? Email us today at hello@designbridge.com to discuss how we can help transform your business with a strategic brand refresh.