Right-sizing your next rebrand

The word “rebrand” can make people a little nervous.

A friend of Hoopla recently told us that their leader went as far as black-listing any use of the words “brand”, “rebrand” or “brand uplift” when seeking quotes for a brand project, because it “always added a zero to the invoice”.

Honestly, we don't blame them.

“Brand” covers an enormous amount of territory, from a thoughtful tidy-up to repositioning and rebuilding a whole brand from the ground up. It’s also one of those nebulous-feeling costs that can be tricky to put a tidy ROI figure against, which makes signing off on spend feel even more fraught.

If you’re nodding along, here are our thoughts on right-sizing a rebrand for your problem, your business and your budget.

Start with what’s actually going on

Brand problems often arrive disguised as requests for deliverables.

“We need a new website” is common. So is “we need to refresh the logo”, “our templates are a mess” or “we need a new campaign platform”.

Sometimes the job to be done really is that simple. Other times, a little digging reveals that your website is underperforming because your business has changed and the messaging hasn’t kept up. Your templates are inconsistent because your brand system has gaps, or the new campaign creative is proving difficult because nobody can agree on what you want to be known for.

The deliverable you need is still important, of course. It’s just useful to understand what’s creating the problem before deciding how much work (and budget) to throw at it.

You don’t need a six-week archaeological dig to work out what’s going on. Start with the obvious questions: What has changed in the business? What are customers confused by? What are teams constantly patching over? And what’s still working just fine? Once you can see where the friction actually sits, it becomes much easier to spend money on the right problem.

You’re allowed to keep things

This sounds obvious, but it’s worth saying because our clients often come into a brand project expecting to be told that everything needs replacing.

Usually, it doesn’t.

Brands accumulate useful things over time. A colour people recognise. A visual device that has become distinctive. A tone of voice customers respond to. A logo that still does its job perfectly well, despite having been around long enough to remember fax machines.

Those things have value. Familiarity has value too, especially in financial services where recognition and trust matter.

We saw this first-hand in our work with CareSuper. Their brand transformation worked because it respected the familiar elements of their brand.

There can be good reasons for dramatic change, but change itself isn’t evidence of progress. If something is working, fits where the business is heading and gives you something distinctive to build from, keeping it can be the smartest design decision in the room.

That’s often where restraint comes in. A good refresh can make a brand feel clearer, more contemporary and much easier to use while leaving its strongest features intact.

How big a job is it, really?

Once you know what needs attention, there are plenty of ways to respond.

A solid brand might just need some sharper typography, a more useful image style, better templates and guidelines that people can follow.

Another business might need to go further. Its positioning could use a rethink, its messaging may have drifted, or its identity might need more range now that the company has grown into new products or audiences.

Then there are the moments where a bigger piece of work genuinely makes sense. A merger, a major shift in strategy, a move into a new market or a business that has changed so much that your brand now feels as relevant as a Livestrong wristband.

These projects can all reasonably be described as brand work, which is part of the reason pricing and scope can feel mysterious from the outside. The useful thing is to make the size of the response proportionate to the size of the issue. A small problem doesn’t need to become a transformation program. Equally, slapping a coat of paint over a deeper strategic problem tends to buy you a return trip to your agency in six months.

If you don’t know whether you need a refresh or the whole shebang, great. That’s the kind of question your agency would love to be brought in to help answer.

Spend on the problem, not the packaging

Brand can be an uncomfortable thing to buy because the value isn’t always sitting there in one obvious object.

A logo is tangible. A website is tangible. “Getting clearer about our positioning so every part of the business communicates the same idea” takes a little more explaining on a purchase order.

A longer shopping list of deliverables doesn’t necessarily mean a better investment. What matters is whether the work addresses the problems that are getting in the way of the success of your business.

Sometimes that means doing less and doing it well. Sometimes it means spending more upfront because a tactical patch would leave the real issue untouched. Either way, you should be able to understand why the scope is what it is and where the money is going.

Making brand a little easier to buy

We’ve recently applied some of this thinking to our own offer.

Our new brand packages give our clients four options: Strategy Sprint, Brand Tune-up, Brand Evolution and Brand Reset. They cover different levels of need, with the scope, price and timing set out upfront so it’s easier to see what kind of job you might actually be looking at.

They’re starting points rather than a game of brand Goldilocks. If your needs sit somewhere between two packages, we’ll help work out what matters most. And where there’s a choice between stretching a larger scope too thinly or doing a smaller piece of work properly, we’d much rather do the latter.

A well-scoped brand project should give you confidence that you’re fixing the right things, investing in the areas that matter most, and not paying to reinvent parts of the brand that are already working perfectly well.

Wondering how big your brand job really is? Take a look at our brand packages, or tell us what’s feeling wobbly and we can help you size it up.