Even the most profitable businesses hit a roadblock somewhere and sometime down the lane, and the brand does not reflect the business message as strongly as needed. This could be due to various reasons – a change in target audience, damages suffered to reputation, loss of brand worth and more. Times like these call for a rebranding, and part of this process includes changing the business logo. This is a complicated process and you have to keep the following 7 factors in mind while rebranding.
Audience expectations
Find out whether you have really lost your audience, or have alienated them in some way. It is important to get their feedback and suggestions through contact forms, survey forms, phone calls, blogs and email surveys. Try to know what the feel about your brand and what they expect each time they see your offerings. This will help you a lot in determining how to refashion your existing brand. You have to identify the audience or consumer. When you are rebranding, you will expect the audience to sit up and take notice of your new logo and approach. It is important to know your customers for this reason, to be able to generate a better response with your new look. The better the audience perception is, the higher the chances of scoring with your re-branding efforts will be.
Social media
The social media is a great way to test your new approach and rebranding efforts. You can test a few samples of the logo and the new colors with the so called “teasers” or “sneak peek”. Gauge the response. On social media, responses can be easily determined without wasting money unnecessarily. Check out whether your new audience is happy with the look, and whether the older ones are happy as well. Much as you would love to target a newer audience, you will not like to lose out with your older customers. Try to use social media platforms that relate to your brand. If you are in corporate business domain, LinkedIn can be a good platform. If you have a general business, it can be a good idea to go for general social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.
Core business objectives
Even if you are rebranding your logo, keep in mind that it should not be something very radically different. The logo, for example, has to reflect your business at the end of the day. It should uphold the goals or objectives of your enterprise, and convey it to customers in a sure but subtle way. This is possible with a logo which is not much different from the older one but presents the entire message in a very different, modern way. Make sure that even the older audience is able to remember your brand, every time they see the logo. They should not feel your business to be a new one. Basically, you have to re-fashion or re-style your brand but not lose out focusing on your core business objectives at the same time.
Colors
Colors are major aspects of a logo, and they should be consistent to your business. If you are in the business of gardening, shades of green are a must. If you are selling aviation products, sky blue colors should be ideal in your logo. Simply put, every domain or industry is associated with one or more specific colors and using the appropriate ones would help customers to easily correlate your logo and brand with your industry area.
Uniqueness
Your logo should be as unique as possible. Do not choose run of the mill designs. When you are re-branding and possibly informing the audience about the same through newsletters, social media and other mediums, you are raising their expectations. Naturally, the restyling should be done in as innovative manner as possible. Try to get in touch with re-branding experts and get their unbiased opinions about the kind of changes you are going for. Such experts have huge experience in re-branding and will be better able to guide you in effective re-styling and presenting your business in a new, engaging and innovative way that will make customers sit up and take notice. At the end of the day, your brand should be clearly distinguishable from others in the market.
Simplicity
While your logo has to be unique, it should also be simple. Avoid complexities unnecessarily, and go with designs as simple as possible. It will serve no purpose for your business to go with a design which turns heads but makes people give up in confusion. Keep in mind that a complex logo will also lose its details once it is printed in small sizes in flyers, business cards and other things. Choose logos with as minimal details as possible, so that your audience can process them more easily. Take a look at those of companies such as Facebook, Apple and Nike and try to understand how they have preferred simplicity over complexities. Your brand logo should be represented by an extremely basic icon which can be reproduced easily at about any size.
Legality
Last but not the least, you should ensure that you have the complete right to use the logo that you have chosen. Many business owners, even the very big ones, commit the basic mistake of selecting a business logo and name similar to some other enterprise and being oblivious of the fact. They charge ahead with their brand efforts and go all guns blazing with their logo, website, signage etc only to face legal actions and penalties staring at them. It is important for you to discuss with a trademark attorney and have him search on your new brand name, logo etc to make sure that the choices are unique indeed.
Keeping these factors in consideration will allow your business to come out bigger and better with a new look and overall approach. The target audience is sure to perceive your business in a whole new way, while recognizing the brand easily and associating it with the industry that it belongs to.
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