How Often Should You Refresh Your Brand?

So I ran the “Design For Business” Course at the EC Training Centre last week and one of the most popular questions that came up was: How often should I refresh my brand?

At the time I said it was good to give things a refresh every 2-3 years.

Being totally honest this is something I’ve never given a massive amount of thought to in the past so I just came up with that number based on experience, but as I drove home that evening I started to think about how we’ve evolved our branding here at Melt and how it was done with other clients during my time at the Entrepreneurs Circle and thebestof.

But then what am I talking about when I say your brand? Your logo, your website or just your font and colours. For me your brand is a lot more than a logo, it’s the fonts, the colours, the tone of your voice in your headlines, the images you use across all materials and the way you position yourself or deal with customer issues – there are a lot of moving parts.

Here’s how the Melt brand has evolved and why…

It All Started With The Logo

In essence I’ve been constantly evolving the brand from day one, last April I updated the font on the Melt logo to something a bit more funky. The version on the right is the current logo and as you can see instantly looks more modern and fun and portrays us in a different light.

Then 2 weeks later we decided to look at the main body font on the website and decided on a rounded version of Museo. Why? We didn’t feel the Roboto font we originally chose worked anymore with the new logo and also made the site look too serious. Sure we are serious about what we do but we want to be portrayed as a company that’s a little fun and stays with the times.

The Melt Website

We’ve also been playing with a few elements on our website to see which elements engaged with visitors the most and gave us the lowest bounce rate possible (made people more sticky) on the website.

I’m happy to say we now have a bounce rate of 7.57% percent on our homepage – This has come down with every tweak we’ve made and I genuinely haven’t seen a bounce rate that low in my 10 years as a web designer.

What did we tweak –

• The Positioning Statement has changed 5 times.

• The Name of the 4 key services. The Marketing tab used to be called Promotions and got zero clicks – by changing it to Marketing it’s now the 4th most clicked item.

• The Text on the button at the top of the website.

• The Type of moving arrows we use on the site.

• The Portfolio Images we’ve used.

• The Testimonials.

All these elements have had a positive effect in moving people from the homepage into the website.

Marketing Materials

The changes we have made to the logo and website have also filtered through our marketing materials.Our little information brochure now has the same positioning statement as the website and the fonts and colours are in sync across all of the following materials;

• Flyers

• Letters

• Show Stands

• Thank You Cards

In Conclusion

As I say this isn’t something we’ve made a conscious effort to do in one big hit – it’s evolved based on user stats and the desire to do something a little different than the competition.

I have a ton more ideas that I will be testing over the coming months and if these work out I’m sure they will work their way into our branded marketing materials.

In order to keep in touch with your industry and keep things fresh I would advise reviewing your brand i.e. logo, fonts and colours every 2-3 years but also be conscious that this is a constantly evolving process.

A Very Common Mistake –

So very often I see logos and brands that have been based on the owner’s preferences – remember what you like may not work for your market.

The colour you use can have a very emotional effect on people and can affect the way they perceive your company.

The font you use can give the impression you are in a field you’re not actually involved in and scare people away or may even be un-readable.

We are lucky that we have an incredible creative team readily available to design these things.

If you employ a great designer or design agency, the life of the design will last a little longer but you do need to be constantly evolving to keep things fresh by introducing small tweaks.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this helpful.

If you need any help with your brand refresh, we would be more than happy to help 🙂

Matt