The Brand Refresh Process
From David Hensley’s company blog, a post on assessing and improving the company brand.
We are often called in to advise on whether and how to refresh B2B brands, and even ‘should we change our name?’ Our advice is always that it depends on the circumstances.
Has the product offer changed significantly?
Has the nature of your competitive advantage changed?
Are your customers becoming less loyal to your brand?
Are you addressing new markets for whom your name or visual identity is inappropriate or ineffective?
If any of these are true, then it is worth considering. And every 10 years or so it is worth reviewing the situation, checking that your look and feel haven’t become dated, and that the qualities that you project are still true of you and valued by your prospective customers and partners.
Case example – Refreshing the Hensley Partners brand
Hensley Partners has now been around for 12 years, so we thought we should take some of our own medicine, and review our own brand. This post is a brief overview of the process and methods we use when planning, creating and deploying a new brand identity. Our client work is typically confidential, so we decided we could and should share how we did it for ourselves.
Stage 1 – Research
Like every project we undertake we started off by auditing our brand – surveying the key stakeholders. So we interviewed and surveyed our partners and clients to get feedback on what they value, and how we compare to competitors.
We then took an objective look at ourselves, to see if our brand image as projected had a good fit with what they valued, and compared it with competitors and best practice examples of branding in professional services and creative agencies.
Key points include:
- Brand strategy factors
- Identity concepts
- Creative intelligence
Read the full article, When and how to refresh a B2B brand, on HensleyParnters.com
