You may have seen earlier this year that Epicor underwent a brand refresh bringing a new look to the company logo, color scheme, messaging, and overall presentation. This refresh was intended to update Epicor’s brand voice to represent them more accurately.
So, what exactly is a brand refresh? A brand refresh is a rejuvenation of a brand’s look and feel, typically including messaging and visuals. A brand refresh is often done to reflect a company’s growth or changes and to represent their journey with their customers.
If you haven’t yet, it might be time to consider a brand refresh for your shop as well! Look closely at your business’s image and decide whether it accurately represents your company and what you offer customers.
Company Purpose and Research
If you’re interested in refreshing your brand, the first step is to ask yourself whether your brand currently fits your company’s purpose, and why or why not? What is your brand’s origin story, values, and goals? The answers to these questions are crucial to an accurate and long-lasting brand refresh. You also will need to choose which key performance indicators will indicate the success of your brand refresh, such as sales growth, to determine whether your brand refresh hit the mark.
Personas
Next, you should reevaluate your target customer’s persona. What are they looking for in your industry? What are their priorities? If your targeting new customers, are they different than when you originally created or last refreshed your brand, and if so, who are these customers? These questions will help you determine who your customers are so you can plan your brand refresh not only around your company, but around your customers.
Competitors
After ensuring you understand your target customers, you should also be sure you understand your competitors. What do they do well? What do they do not-so-well? You want to set yourself apart from your competitors while also appealing to your customers, so understanding what your competitors are doing and what works and what doesn’t is a great step to setting yourself up for future success with your brand image.
Messaging and Voice
When communicating with your customers and potential customers, you want to be able to connect with them in a way that is completely you. Your brand voice should reflect your company essence and should be recognizable among competitors. Choose your brand’s stance on main topics essential to your industry and company philosophy and tailor your voice and messaging around those positions to create a unique brand characteristic and market position.
This also would be a good time to choose your brand’s typography. Here you want to choose a type or font classification with a high readability that still reflects your brand. Some common typefaces include Helvetica and Serif, but you can choose anything as long as you consider the type properties, classification, and readability in relation to your brand messaging. You can learn more on that here.
Logo and Identity
Along with choosing typography, you’ll likely want to update your brand colors and logo as well. This can be very fun or very difficult, depending on how much you like making design choices. There are many brand agencies out there that can help you design a new logo and choose typography settings to ensure they meet your new brand identity, or you can do the logo and typography design yourself. Be sure to put a lot of thought into your logo and typography choices and get second opinions on design choices when necessary to make sure you’re not overlooking any issues. Your logo, brand colors, and typeface choices are often the first part of your brand the world will see, on your website, social media, and any branded merchandise you create, so you want it to be as accurate as possible when reflecting your brand.
Announcements
How will you announce your brand refresh and what will you say? Both your stakeholders and customers will need to be made aware of your brand refresh once it is ready to launch and it is important to communicate clearly why your brand refresh was necessary, what your motivations were behind it, and what you hope to gain by the refresh. You also need to choose the channels on which you will announce the refresh. Will you post it on social media? Send out a personalized email? Decide where you are most likely to reach those intended to receive the message and choose the channel or channels most likely to get it to them. After all, if no one sees the brand refresh all this work will be less effective and likely confusing to customers and stakeholders alike.
Refresh Roll-Out
Now that your plan is in place, finally you can launch your brand refresh. Make sure your employees are aware of your new brand identity and confirm its use in all internal and external communications. Update your social media pages and launch any new ones you’ve planned, update your website, and your communications with your new logo and typography choices, and then announce your brand refresh! After the refresh roll-out you should continue to measure your previously set KPI’s and make any plan changes needed to make sure your brand refresh is as effective performance-wise as possible.
Final Reminder
And now you know how to create an effective brand refresh. It may seem like a lot of information, but don’t get discouraged! You don’t need to forget what your company is. Remember that your company is still the same one as it was before the refresh. While your image and voice may be changing a bit, keep in mind that you don’t want to stray too far from the original source material, your company is already successful if you are needing a brand refresh, so you don’t want to lose what makes it unique, you just want to emphasize that it’s improved.
If you want to learn about MechanicNet Cloud CRM for use in your business, call (877) 632-4638 or reach us online.